For Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong(a)yahoo.com
City Art Presents Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen andNebraska poet Steve Langan
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday April 22nd 7:00—9:00 P.M.Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen and Nebraska poet Steve Langanwill read from their works Wednesday April 22nd at the Salt Lake Public Library at 7:00 P.M.in the fourth floor conference room. Lance Larsen’s fourth collection ofpoems, Genius Loci, wasrecently published by University of Tampa Press. His earlier collectionsinclude Backyard Alchemy(2009), In All Their Animal Brilliance(2005), and Erasable Walls(1998). He holds a PhD from the University of Houston. His workappears widely, in such venues as Georgia Review, Southern Review,Ploughshares, Poetry, River Styx, Orion, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, BestAmerican Poetry 2009, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. His nonfiction hastwice made the Notable Essay list in Best American Essays. He iscurrently working on Seventeen Ways toFloat, a collection of essays about place, family, and memory whichwon 1st place in the 2011 Utah Original Writing Competition. He grew upin Idaho and Colorado and lived in Chile for two years while serving an LDSmission. He collects antiques, plays basketball, occasionally walks onhis hands, grows daylilies, hikes, and loves Indian and Thai food. Hesometimes collaborates with his wife, Jacqui Biggs Larsen, a painter and multi-mediaartist. Since 1993 he has taught literature and creative writing at BYU,where he currently serves as associate chair. He and Jacqui recentlydirected a study abroad program in Madrid. In 2012, he was named to afive-year term as Utah Poet Laureate.
Steve Langan was born inMilwaukee and raised in Omaha. He earned degrees from the University ofNebraska and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Langan is the authorof Freezing (2001), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (2005), Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009),and What It Looks Like, How ItFlies (2013).In Prairie Schooner, Nicky Beerwrote, “Though the landscapes of the poems are distinctly interior andpsychological, one cannot help but read this interior as a uniquely Americanone. Much of the anomie and anxiety in Noteson Exile and Other Poems seems to be the product of a culturewhere rapture is trivialized by its proximity with the quotidian, and languageis often a treacherous, euphemistic subterfuge. Langan is clearlydeveloping his considerable gift to elegize the fragmented, desperate, andsoulful American poetic voice on the cusp of the twenty-first century.”Reviewing for MAKE Magazine, Weston Cutternoted, “What makes Langan’s Meet Meat the Happy Bar stand so far out from other collections isnot just the whirligig zip and whiplash he causes by putting disparate linesnext to and on top of each other, nor the ache for some substantial meaning tobedazzle all this flotsam onto, some foundation to leave the heaps upon. No,what makes this all such a big deal is the explicit emphasis on now, on time.”Langan teaches at theUniversity of Nebraska MFA in Writing program. He is founder and director ofthe Seven Doctors Project, based in Omaha, in which area writers guidehealthcare workers in a writing workshop. Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. Theevent is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City ArtsCouncil, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations. Joel Long
