Monsters + MMoCA

Overview

Thursday, September 26 • 7 PM • Lobby • Free Admission

MMoCA has partnered with the Monsters of Poetry for a reading of original works inspired by Shilpa Gupta: I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt. Poets are writing in response to Shilpa Gupta’s work, exploring and expanding on the themes of individual and collective identity, the power of information and language, and the physical and ideological existence of boundaries.

Monsters + MMoCA is organized by the Museum’s Education Department in partnership with Adam Fell, a founding member and co-curator of Monsters of Poetry. The event is scheduled to coincide with Banned Books Week, an annual event bringing together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, and highlighting the value of free and open access to information.

Participating poets include Steven Espada Dawson, Nicholas Gulig, Erika Meitner, Natasha Oladokun, and Timothy Yu. Bios below.

-Steven Espada Dawson, from East Los Angeles and the son of a Mexican immigrant, is the author of LATE TO THE SEARCH PARTY (Scribner, 2025). He is a former Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow, and his poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as Poet Laureate.

-Nicholas Gulig, a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin, was educated at the University of Montana (BA), the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop (MFA), and the University of Denver (PhD). A 2011 Fulbright Scholar to Thailand, Dr. Gulig has received numerous awards, including the CSU 2017 Open Book Poetry Award, the Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Prize, the Grist ProForma Prize, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, the Ruskin Arts Club Award, and the Cutbank Prose Poetry Award. With over 30 print and online publications, he is also the author of the poetry collections North of Order (YesYes Books), Book of Lake (CutBank), and Orient (Cleveland State University). An Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, he resides in Fort Atkinson with his wife and daughter.

-Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poetry, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, and The New Republic. Meitner is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in 2022.

-Natasha Oladokun, a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia, earned a BA in English from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry Fellow. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Image, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, and Catapult. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.

-Timothy Yu is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press), the Editor’s Selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest, and the book Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press), and serves as executive editor of the journal Contemporary Literature. His poetry publications include two chapbooks, 15 Chinese Silences (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Journey to the West (Barrow Street), winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Cordite, Mantis, SHAMPOO, Lantern Review, and Kartika Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Jacket, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Volta, Meanjin, and on CNN.com.

The poetry reading will take place in the museum’s lobby