This live virtual reading will be accessible from the Inprint website. Only those who purchase a ticket will receive details (in the Eventbrite receipt) on how to log on to the live reading. Season subscribers will receive details directly from Inprint. For questions, contact info@inprinthouston.org.
Both authors will give short readings from their remarkable new poetry collections Felon and Postcolonial Love Poem and then join in conversation. To submit questions for the poets, click here.
Order books at a discount: Order the latest collections by Betts and Diaz through Brazos Bookstore and receive a 10% discount. To order Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts click here. To order Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz click here. To receive a discount, enter INPRINT in the Coupon Code box in the Shopping Cart, and click on Apply To Order. Curbside pick up is available at Brazos Bookstore.
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS comes to Houston to share his new poetry collection Felon, “bracing, revelatory work” (Mitchell S. Jackson) that animates what it means to be a “felon” while confronting the smear of post-incarceration and prison as a force that enacts a lifetime of pressure. He is the author of two other poetry collections – Bastards of the Reagan Era and Shahid Reads His Own Palm – and A Question of Freedom, his NAACP Image Award-winning memoir, a searing, uplifting story that follows an eight-year prison sentence (starting when he was 16) and his resoluteness against being reduced to the 30 seconds he held a gun in his hand. With more than “just a powerful story to tell,” Jericho Brown calls Betts “a true poet who can write a ghazal that sings, howls, rhymes, and resonates in memory.” He is a graduate of Yale Law School, received an MFA from Warren Wilson, and is currently a PhD candidate in law at Yale.
NATALIE DIAZ, born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village, is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her debut collection When My Brother Was an Aztec, which won an American Book Award, draws upon reservation folklore, pop culture, fractured gospels, and her brother’s addiction to methamphetamine in a delicate balance of stark intimacy and gorgeous lyricism. Among her other honors, Diaz has received a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, as well as the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Native Arts Council Foundation. She comes to Houston to read from her new collection Postcolonial Love Poem, which, according to Adrian Matejka, “elegantly negotiates experience, tradition, and myth” and demonstrates that she is “a poet who understands tradition but is not beholden to it.” Diaz teaches in the Arizona State University Creative Writing Program.
