Come celebrate the new hybrid book of poems, Let It Die Hungry, by Caits Meissner! For this reading, Caits will be joined by local poets C. Russell Price and Marty McConnell.
Recklessly sensual, provocative and profoundly curious, Meissner's coming-of-age poems seek to anchor their place in a messy world, blurring the edges of hard borders and disparate identities. Finding joy, connection and determination in desperate spaces, as well as the slippery terrain of a changing self, Meissner's voice is at once a reckoning, a proclamation, and an open question. Sprinkled with the author's illustrations, the book's multidisciplinary approach also includes lesson plans, originally utilized in a women's prison, that invite the reader to write their own way out of polarizing dichotomies — and into the vast grey space of what it means to be alive.
CAITS MEISSNER's poetry has been awarded first place prizes from the Pan-African Literary Forum, the Ja-Nai Foundation and City College's The Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize in Creative Writing for a significant manuscript in poetry. Widely published in journals and anthologies including Drunken Boat, The Offing, The Literary Review and The Feminist Wire, Caits’ book, The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You, co-written with poet Tishon Woolcock, arrived in 2012 on Well&Often press. Let It Die Hungry, her first solo full-length collection of poems is forthcoming on The Operating System. Caits experiments with illustrated poems, and has collaborated extensively with musicians— her own poetry/music EP, the wolf & me, was released in 2010. She is currently Writer in Residence at Bronx Academy of Letters, a creative writing instructor in a women's prison and a part-time lecturer at The New School University.