Name: SPECTRA Reading Series: Elizabeth Willis
Start: 2025-04-10T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Rozz-Tox

SPECTRA Reading Series: Elizabeth Willis

SPECTRA Reading Series Returns 4/10 featuring Elizabeth Willis
Who: Midwest Writing Center presents the SPECTRA Reading Series
What: Elizabeth Willis w/ Tanya Rastogi & Sophia Best
When: Thursday, April 10 – 7pm Open Mic | 8pm Reading
Where: Rozz-Tox (2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL)
Cost: free & open | donations welcome | books available for purchase
SPECTRA Lives! The Quad Cities longest-running reading series returns to Rozz-Tox on Thursday, April 10 with a special event featuring Elizabeth Willis reading from her latest book Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), which was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry.
Willis will be joined by the '24-'25 Iowa Student Poet Ambassador Tanya Rastogi and Sophia Best, whose first chapbook PINK BATHWATER won the Iowa Chapbook Prize. This is the first of two SPECTRA events celebrating National Poetry Month; MWC is also hosting a reading from a poet every day on their YouTube channel throughout the month of April.
An open mic starts things off at 7:00 p.m. (spaces are limited, 5-minute sets, first come first serve), and the featured readings begin at 8:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase. Donations to MWC are welcome and go to support youth writing programs in the QC.
Please contact Ryan Collins at MWC with questions and media inquiries: [email protected] | 309-732-7330.
The SPECTRA Reading Series is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Illinois Arts Council.
Bio:
Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence . She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Sophia Best is a current writing student at WIU. In 2023, she won the Iowa Chapbook Prize and published “Pink Bathwater.” She participated in the Midwest Writing Center’s Young Emerging Writers program for three summers and is featured in the 13th, 14th, and 15th editions of The Atlas.
Tanya Rastogi is an artist and writer from Bettendorf and serves as the '24-'25 Iowa Student Poet Ambassador. Her work has been published in The Adroit Journal, Shō Poetry Journal, Gone Lawn, and others. She is also the founding editor of The Seraphic Review. She enjoys hot tea, long evening walks, and anything sweet.