In conjunction with the exhibition “Paolo Arao: Flagettes,” Esopus copresented an evening of poetry readings by Suzanne Highland, who was in residency with Arao at the Vermont Studio Center, and two other Brooklyn-based poets, Laura Buccieri and Lauren Clark. The program, which took place on Wednesday, May 30th, at Picture Room (117 Atlantic Street, Brooklyn), also served as the closing reception for Arao's exhibition.
PHOTO (clockwise from top left): Paolo Arao, installation photo; Suzanne Highand, Lauren Clark, Laura Buccieri.
Suzanne Highland is a writer, teacher, queerdo, and native of Florida currently living in Queens. She has a BA from Florida State University and an MFA from Hunter College, where she received the Miriam Weinberg Richter Memorial Award. She has also been awarded fellowships or prizes from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and Vermont Studio Center, and her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Yalobusha Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Bone Bouquet, No, Dear, and LEVELER. A few times a year she hosts Culture Club NYC, a multidisciplinary reading and art share, which you should all come to and be a part of.
Laura Buccieri is the author of on being mistaken (PANK Books, 2018). You can find her forthcoming and most recent work in Cosmonauts Avenue, Metatron, Prelude, Lambda Literary, Word Riot, Apogee, and elsewhere. She is the Publicist at Copper Canyon Press & lives in NYC— and online at laurabuccieri.com.
Lauren Clark's first collection of poems, Music for a Wedding, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winner Vijay Seshadri for the 2016 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the fall of 2017. Lauren holds BA in Classics from Oberlin College and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where they were the recipient of two Zell Fellowships and a Civitas Fellowship. Their work was awarded first place in the Graduate Poetry division of the Hopwood Awards, as well as the Theodore Roethke Prize for long poetic sequence and the the Michael R. Gutterman Prize for a poem exemplifying the new, the unusual, and the radical. They have been the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, as well as scholarships from the Sewanee Writers Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. As a Civitas Fellow, they served as an InsideOut Literary Arts Writer-in-Residence in Detroit Public Schools for two years.
Paolo Arao is a visual artist who has been living and working in Brooklyn since 2000. He received a B.F.A. in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999 and has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and The Atlantic Center of the Arts. His solo exhibitions include three shows at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York—Make Them Love You (2004), Intermission (2006), and Fornever (2008)—as well as Between the Lights at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis (2010). Arao has been featured in numerous group shows and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005) and Socrates Sculpture Park (2002).