Writers' Workshop summer faculty member Amanda Nadelberg will read from Songs from a Mountain. "Amanda Nadelberg's poetry resembles a city where all kinds of things are happening at once, some of them funny and others pretty scary— a dizzying achievement that rings out loud and precise and clear." —John Ashbery

Nadelberg is also the author of Bright Brave Phenomena and Isa the Truck Named Isadore, winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize. She was selected as one of Poetry Society of America's New American Poets, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Oakland, California. 

Fred Schmalz will read from Action in the Orchards. In this debut poetry collection, Schmalz transforms encounters —with art and architecture, friends and strangers, past and future — into irreverent, musical meditations on art-making, daily life, love, and mortality. Through a kaleidoscope of speech fragments, elisions, leaps, and wordplay, the poems invoke rich sensory and emotional perspectives.

Schmalz is an artist and poet whose current writing focuses on textual response to encounters with music, visual art, and performance. In 2018, he was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as poet-in-residence for the FluxConcert in its year-long Fluxus Festival. He lives in Chicago, where he makes art with Susy Bielak in the collaborative Balas & Wax.