Writers' Workshop graduate Stephen Haven will read from his newest poetry collection, The Flight from Meaning, and poet Rosa Lane will read from her newest collection, Called Back.

The Flight from Meaning is described by publisher Slant Books as poems that "have been shaped by — and serve as responses to — an American predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction – the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world." Andrew Hudgins, author of Saints & Strangers and The Never-Ending, says, "Stephen Haven’s The Flight from Meaning strains at the limits of expression, trying to see past, around, and through layers of intellectually imposed 'meaning' to the thing that drove him first to meaning: the poet’s own past, family, and the natural world."

Rosa Lane's poetry collection Called Back is described by publisher Tupelo Press: "In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane’s Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue, poem after poem, decoding secrets amidst the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson’s work, Lane breaks through the historical barrier of time, unravels the extraordinary amidst the ordinary, and lays bare the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as revealed in Dickinson’s poems." Called Back is praised by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson as "[breaking] through the membrane that separates us from Dickinson’s time," while Henri Cole says, "What marvelous, feral, eccentric, sweetly erotic poems! Like a candle in a frosted window, they illuminate — with electrifying language — the shadows of human love."

Stephen Haven is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America (New American Press, 2012), selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Prize. He has two previous collections of poetry, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008), for which he was named 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (University of New Mexico/West End Press, 2004). He is also author of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). Haven's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Salmagundi, Image, North American Review, Guernica, Western Humanities Review and Blackbird, among other journals. He has received fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and at the Djerassi Foundation, five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council, and two year-long Fulbright Foundation grants to teach in Beijing universities. Haven is Professor of English in the Humanities Division at Lesley University, where he also serves on the poetry faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Rosa Lane, poet and architect, is author of four poetry collections including Called Back (September 2024, Tupelo Press) selected during Tupelo’s 2022 Summer Open Reading Period; Chouteau’s Chalk (2019, winner, UGA Poetry Prize); Tiller North (2016, winner, Sixteen Rivers Press Manuscript Competition); and Roots and Reckonings (chapbook). Lane’s work won the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize among other prizes and has appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Catamaran, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, RHINO, River Heron Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She splits her time between her native home in coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her wife.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}