Snail Trail

Snail Trail: A Reading

The snails come out in the rain... for an AWP offsite! Join Snail Trail Press for readings, art objects and experiences, refreshments, and more at Common Area Maintenance in Belltown.

Doors: 6:30 p.m.

Readings: 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. (with intermissions)

Featuring Ryan Bollenbach, Amaranth Borsuk & Terri Witek, jace brittain, Jennifer Calkins & Anne de Marcken, Ching-In Chen, Kenning JP García, Tracy Jane Gregory, Joe Hall, nanya jhingran, Nadine Antoinette Maestas, Katie Naughton, Pamela K. Santos, and Dana Venerable.

We encourage attendees to wear masks, and will have masks available for anyone who needs one.

Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbooks Study (Above/Ground Press, 2021) and A Second Singing (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, 2023). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal." She is the publicist and an assistant editor at Essay Press, editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2023), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo, a 2022-2023 Fulbright student research fellow at Simon Fraser University in Canada to conduct archival research on Lisa Robertson, and a 2022-2023 Graduate Student Research Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale University to conduct archival research on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. She has an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University and was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in August 2019.

Terri Witek’s 8 books of poetry include her newest collection, Something’s Missing in This Museum (2023). Witek’s art/text mixes are especially featured in collaboration: she teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes; they also lead The Fernando Pessoa Game at the Disquiet International Literary Program each summer in Lisbon. Their work is represented by the liminal in Valencia, Spain. terriwitek.com

Jen Calkins is an environmental lawyer, evolutionary biologist, and antidisciplinary writer and artist. Her most recent book is the lyric noir novel Fugitive Assemblage (The 3rd Thing Press). In 2019, she and Anne de Marcken initiated a multi-year project engaging the climate crisis via durational performance, poetic interruption (collected in Annihilation is Underway), and collaborative creative events. This year, in addition to litigating against casual environmental destruction, she is curating Delisted 2023, a year long collaborative creative engagement with the extinction crisis. jen lives on Coast Salish territory with a variety of more than human beings including, at times, two college aged human children.

Ching-In Chen is descended from ocean dwellers and author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project as well as a mentor for the Alphabet Alliance of Color. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They teach at University of Washington Bothell. www.chinginchen.com

Jace Brittain is the author of the novel Sorcererer (Schism 2022). He runs the small press Carrion Bloom Books with the poet and book artist Rachel Zavecz.

Dana Venerable (she, her(s)) is a writer, educator, former co-editor of P-QUEUE journal (2019-2022), and a SUNY-University at Buffalo (UB) English PhD candidate with a concentration in Performance Studies. She lived between Buffalo, NY and the Jersey Shore (her birthplace) for the past few years and currently works in the President's Office with the Equity in Action Postdoctoral Fellowship at Kean University. Her research addresses methods of the archive through compositions and intersections of Black performance, dance, notation, social choreography, and sound. Dana has performed within artist collectives at UB Arts Collaboratory, PLAY/GROUND, UB’s Choreolab, and UB's MFA Dance Concert. In addition, she was a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center from 2019-2022. She won the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize at UB. Dana has written for Rigorous, Snail Trail Press, Free Your Soul & Mind Inc., P-QUEUE, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. Her collaborative, choreographed chapbook "water signatures" is out by What Happens Magazine and their semi-annual publication series "in the grasses" here: https://whathappens.world/leaflet-series. She can be found dancing and singing around almost anywhere but especially her room, writing (!), listening to music, and doing her hair.

Tracy Jane Gregory is a cross-genre writer, fabric artist, and queer feminist. She has earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from University of Washington-Bothell and currently works as an Academic Success Specialist in the Residential Life Department of UC Berkeley. Gregory has published work in Best American Experimental Writing, the anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing by Black Lawrence Press, and most recently, Oscillator Press with her chapbook Possessive Spirit: A Beginner’s User Guide. For more of her work, visit her website: tracyjanegregory.com or track her down in San Francisco, CA.

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press) and Handiwork (Slope Editions) as well as three collaborative books of poems. Her latest volume is The Book (MIT Press), a concise introduction to the book as object, content, idea, and interface. She is director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell.

Nanya Jhingran is a poet, scholar, & teacher from Lucknow, India currently living by the coastal margin of the Salish Sea, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People (upon which the city of Seattle was built). She is an Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest where she edits the book reviews section. Her recent work can be found in Waxwing, Moss Lit, Poetry Northwest, and Canthius, among others. You can find her online at www.nanyajhingran.com

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet's poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. She currently teaches Cornish College of the Arts. Nadine holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan’s Hellen Zell Writer’s Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of “Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Ofrenda Magazine, Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, Poor Mojo’s Almana(k), Really Serious Literature Disappearing Chapbooks, and the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario. Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her first solo book was published by Really Serious Literature Press in April 2021.

Ryan Bollenbach is a dream who barely remembers you. He's nostalgic, a little sad; distant, but warm. He's very pleased to meet you.

Joe Hall is a Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator in love with public space, garbage, and Cheryl. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Fugue & Strike (2023) and Someone’s Utopia (2018). Get in touch with Joe at joehalljoehall.com or @joehalljoehall.

Kenning JP García is an Afro-Absurdist diarist and humorist. Xe is the author of the chapbook, Ghost Notes (Spiral Editions). Xe is also an editor at Rigorous and Dream Pop Press.

Event Venue

Common Area Maintenance, 2125 2nd Avenue, Seattle, United States