Zoeglossia Poets to Read and
Host Live Q&A at 2020 Dodge Festival
Four poets – Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Ellen McGrath Smith, and Lateef McLeod – will represent Zoeglossia at the 2020 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival set to begin on October 22, 2020.
“This is a tremendous opportunity on the national stage for poets who identify as having a disability,” said Connie Voisine, co-founder of Zoeglossia. “We’re thankful for the opportunity to participate in the national conversation about disability, accessibility and the arts.”
This year’s Festival will begin on Thursday, October 22, and live streaming events online will likely take place over a number of days or weeks. The overall format is still to be determined but is expected to encompass the Festival’s acclaimed program of readings, performances, and conversations.
In the name of access and equity, live streaming of the 2020 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival will be offered online at no charge. Performances on-demand will be available to the general public for a nominal subscription fee. Schools and teachers that register in advance will have free full access.
The Zoeglossia reading will be broadcast at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 31st. The live chat with the poets will begin at 2:45 p.m.
For regularly updated information about the 2020 Dodge Poetry Festival’s virtual plans, please visit DodgePoetry.org. Find the Festival (#DPF20) on social media:
Facebook: Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
Twitter: @DodgePoetryFest
Instagram: @dodgepoetry
More on the authors representing Zoeglossia at the festival:
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s books include The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn and Streaming as well as a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer. She is the editor of the anthologies Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, Effigies II and Effigies III. She teaches for the University of California at Riverside where she directs Writers Week and Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined, federal outreach project with K-12 schools. She is the founder/organizer of the Sandhill Crane Retreat.
Travis Chi Wing Lau is an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020 forthcoming).
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron, and other journals, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in the fall of 2014, and her book, Nobody's Jackknife, was published in 2015 by the West End Press.
Lateef McLeod has earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. He is in his fourth year in the Anthropology and Social Change Doctoral program at California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. He published his first poetry book entitled A Declaration of A Body Of Love in 2010 chronicling his life as a black man with a disability and tackling various topics on family, dating, religion, spirituality, his national heritage and sexuality. He also published another poetry book entitled Whispers of Krip Love, Shouts of Krip Revolution in 2020.