Julia M. Paul and Henk Rossouw

Reading starts with an Open Mic

Julia M. Paul is author of two full-length collections, Shook (Grayson Books) and Table with Burning Candle (Cornerstone Press) and a chapbook, Staring Down the Tracks (The Poetry Box). Her poems are widely published in journals and anthologies. Paul leads the Riverwood Poetry Series, a long-running poetry reading series in Hartford, CT. Her poem, Dear Coroner, How Could You Know, appears in the 2023 Pushcart Prize XLVII Best of the Small Presses anthology. About her latest book, the poet Ilya Kaminsky, says: “Deeply moving, this requiem, this elegy chronically the stages of grief through multiple lyric modes. These pages are as musical as they are heartbreaking.”

Henk Rossouw’s debut Xamissa (Fordham University Press, 2018) won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in the 2018 box set New-Generation African Poets: Tano. His poems have been in POETRY, Boston Review, World Literature Today, Iowa Review, Adroit Journal, and The Paris Review, among other places. He earned his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Houston and his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An associate professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and serves as a consulting editor for the African Poetry Book Series. From South Africa, he lives in Concord, Massachusetts.