Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com
JP Grasser and Michael Kroesche at City Art
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday December 4th, 7:00—9:00 P.M.
Poets JP Grasser and Michael Kroesche will read from their work December 4th at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series.
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, JP Grasser is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief for Quarterly West. His latest work is forthcoming from Best New Poets 2019, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and Narrative Magazine, among others.
Michael Kroesche is a Salt Lake
City native who recently returned home in December of 2018 following a decade
spent writing, publishing, teaching, and working all over the world. From
teaching ESL in Guangzhou and translating Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry from
French into English in Québec to teaching at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas and working intensely in academic, popular, and community levels of Las
Vegas’ literary and creative communities, writing has managed to remain the
most consistent aspect of his experience. While having published short fiction,
academic work, and creative nonfiction in a number of journals and presenting
it at various events such as the annual Pop Culture Conference in Las Vegas, he
works primarily in poetry. Most recently he has spent the last 5 years working
on a manuscript about grief and Aokigahara, the Japanese “suicide forest” or
“sea of trees”. Poetry and creative nonfiction from this work have been
presented at a number of readings and conferences and has appeared in
publications such as The Colorado Review, The Literary Review, among others,
and he was also interviewed by BBC 4’s Whistledown productions in July of 2018
about Aokigahara for a long-form piece they were producing about the forest.
When he isn’t writing or working in his new career at Capstone Title and
Escrow, Michael enjoys cooking, playing piano, boxing, performing at standup
comedy open mics, and spending time with his family and his significant other,
Carly, and her cat Lyle.
Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.