Solarities 2: Kimberly Alidio and Stacy Szymaszek

Solarities is a poetry reading series bringing established and emerging visiting writers to Duke. For our second event, we welcome poets Stacy Szymaszek and Kimberly Alidio. Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry: Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, A Year From Today (2018), The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Their most recent chapbook Three Novenas was published by auric books in 2022. They are the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007-2028 they were the Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. They currently live and work in New York's Hudson Valley with the poet Kimberly Alidio. Kimberly Alidio (she/they) is the author of Teeter (Nightboat Books), why letter ellipses (selva oscura press), : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna* Collaborative), and after projects the resound (Black Radish Books). In addition to her full-length poetry collections, she has published four chapbooks: ROOM TONE (Belladonna* Collaborative), a cell of falls (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs), shaping and edging (Center for Art and Thought); and solitude being alien (Dancing Girl Press). She is a literary artist trained in the academic fields of United States History and Asian American Studies; she holds a MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Her most recent poetic-critical essays are published on The Poetry Foundation and the anthology, Filipino Studies (New York University Press). She recently published visual-concrete poems in the Madrid-based Juf magazine and in New York-based Hauser & Wirth's Ursula magazine. A video-poem for the late Marthe Reed, publisher of Alidio's first book, was nominated for Best-of-the-Net by The Denver Quarterly. Her writing has been nominated for the United States Artists Fellowship and awarded the Nightboat Poetry Prize. She is a 2023-2024 Emerge-Surface-Be Mentor for The Poetry Project and an adjunct professor for the Bard Prison Initiative. She writes and lives on Munsee-Mohican lands along the Mahicannituck River, otherwise known as New York's Upper Hudson Valley.