Fall Convergence

Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, and The Washington Post; he is the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His book of lectures on poetry and painting, The Unsignificant, was published by Wave Books in Fall 2024.

Photo Cred: Kaitlyn Shea

Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a RedLine Artist In-Residence and a Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India). Her third book, A Catalogue of Future Mercies, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026. She has two films, Dogana/Chapti (2019, Official Selection at Frameline43 and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper’s Bazaar (India), Revry, as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” She has recent publications with The Academy of American Poets, Burrow Press Review, Sink, Foglifter, and the anthology Alone Together: Love , Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Washington State Book Award, 2021). She also has critical essays in Matters of Feminist Practice (Belladonna Collective, 2019), Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Anthology on Anti-Racism and Repair in the Arts (Amherst College Press, forthcoming 2025) and in the republication of Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (Sinister Wisdom, 2023). She has been featured on NPR’s Great American Folk Show with Tom Brosseau as well as Shin Yu Pai’s podcast, Ten Thousand Things. Serena is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic and collagist whose notable long poem Drafts was published by Coffee House Press in May 2025, written between 1986 and 2012, and conceptualized as an excessive and wide-ranging work of socio-poesis exploring an ethical aesthetics. CHAX Press had published her Selected Poems 1980-2020 in 2022.  Her recent, relevant critical books include A Long Essay on the Long Poem from University of Alabama Press (2023); and a fierce poetic response to the multiple events of  2020, Daykeeping (Selva Oscura, 2023). In her career as a poet-critic, she has written extensively on gender, poetry and both feminist- experimental and objectivist poetics, including a classic gender trilogy The Pink Guitar  Writing as Feminist Practice; Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work;  and Purple Passage: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.The collection Traces, with Days from 2015-2025 is her socio-lyric study of the era we are in, tracked in several short books (in process and in print).  Her considerable critical work on Objectivist poetry and poetics includes her pioneering editing of The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Among her several awards are a residency at Bellagio, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a year at the National Humanities Center.  Poetry by DuPlessis in translation includes books in French, Italian and Russian, and individual works and chapbooks appearing in German, Portuguese and Spanish. Her website is  www.rachelblauduplessis.net; all Drafts are available recorded at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/DuPlessis.php. She is Emerita Professor at Temple University.

Robert Fitterman is the author of 16 books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem published with Winter Editions (2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. (UDP), Nevermind (Wonder Books) and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). His long poem, Metropolis, was published in 4 volumes between 2000-2010: Sprawl: Metropolis 30A (Make Now Press, 2009), Metropolis 30: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books, 2004), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House, 2002), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Sabine Herrmann, Natalie Czech, Tim Davis, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective, Collective Task www.collectivetask.org. Fitterman’s poetry has been described as reaching for a new lyricism by composing with found language reconstructed to articulate a subjective, “personal” relationship to social themes. His books are often single book-length poems with broad critiques of institutions: e.g., social media, online forums, museums, reviews, etc. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.

Jade Lascelles is a writer, editor, musician, and artist based in Colorado. She is the author of Violence Beside (Essay Press), The Inevitable (Gesture Press), and All Things Born | Proximate Seams (with visual artist Todd Edward Herman, East Window). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, various literary journals, and the anthologies Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, Dwell: Poems About Home, and Precipice: Writing at the Edge. She has been featured in the Ed Bowes film Gold Hill; the Bologna In Lettere festival’s International Poetry Review; the visual art exhibits Shame Radiant, Joysome, and Disgust: Unhealthy Practices; and the Natalia Gaia short film A Spark Catches, which won second prize at the 2022 Maldito Festival de Videopoesia. Jade holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and plays drums in a few different musical projects.

Kelly Puig is a Cuban-American writer and interdisciplinary artist. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University where she was the recipient of the Weston Prize for best graduate work in addition to the Frances Mason Harris Prize for best manuscript of poetry or prose fiction written by a woman. Her cross-genre debut, The Book of Embers, was selected by Amaranth Borsuk for the Essay Press Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in A Mouth Holds Many Things (Fonograf Editions), Hyena (Hexentexte), Witness, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere.

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.