What Light: Judges for Round Three
Read about the folks who chose from the excellent submissions to create the current series of poems on What Light. Look for the What Light anthology in February!
What Light: This Week’s Poem publishes one new poem by a Minnesota poet every week. The series appears on mnartists.org and on the website of Magers and Quinn Booksellers, its sponsor. What Light also features readings by the poets at Magers and Quinn in Uptown, as well as at other locations. The new big news is that we’ll also be publishing a book of all of our What Light poets, as well as our illustrious judges, in February of 2007!
The judges for this round of What Light made wonderful and diverse choices from hundreds of submitted poems, arriving from all corners of the state. We are very grateful for their time and critical acumen.
Julie Bates
Julie Bates is a local freelance writer, spoken word poet and literary programs manager for Intermedia Arts’ SASE literary programs. She spent four years on the Twin Cities’ spoken word scene, performing at the MN Fringe Festival, Amazon Fridays, Urban Griots Saturdays, Art-A-Whirl, and the University of Wisconsin; and was the co-coach of Minnesota’s 2006 Youth Slam team, which competed nationally in New York City last April.
Ms. Bates has extensive experience teaching creative writing and performance poetry to young people. In July, Ms. Bates completed a residency at North Minneapolis’ Avenues for Homeless Youth as part of the documentary project The Sheltering Home Chronicles with spoken word artists e.g. Bailey, Sha Cage, Truthmaze, and photographer Wing Young Huie.
Ms. Bates is a regular contributor to The Rake magazine. She studied creative writing at Metropolitan State University with award-winning author Alison McGhee.
Asked for her take on poetry, she says, “Whether it murmurs or screams, or licks my ear, the poem that speaks is true.”
Chris Fischbach
Chris Fischbach is the Senior Editor at Coffee House Press, where he has acquired and edited both poetry and fiction for the past eleven years. He has also served on and was the co-chair of the Minneapolis Arts Commission; is Assistant Director of the Twin Cities Book Festival; and serves on the Outreach Committee of the Board of the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library. He has performed his poetry in the Twin Cities and Boulder, Colorado, and has published poems and reviews in various local and national periodicals. He lives in Minneapolis.
Chris has this to say concerning his take on poetry and what he likes: “In my own poetry-reading life, as well as in my role as poetry acquisitions editor at Coffee House Press, I am looking for writing that is honest, confident, and forceful. I am drawn especially to poets and poetry that participate in the poetic communities of the past and present, especially those communities that are friendly to experimentation of form, content, and culture.”
Emily Cook
Emily Cook is the Marketing & Publicity Manager at Milkweed Editions, and has
served as Co-Assistant Director of the Twin Cities Book Festival for two years.
Previously, she lived in Chicago where she was Program Director of the Chicago
Tribune Printers Row Book Fair, and often served as a panelist for the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA Writing critique panels, and as a judge for
WBEZ’s Stories on Stage story contest.
She says, “Here’s my statement on poetry (lifted from a Poet): ‘Poetry’s ability to contribute to the work of doing philosophy is intrinsic to its medium, language. Every phrase, every sentence, is an investigation of an idea’ (Lyn Hejinian).”