Poetry in the Parks: Aaron Coleman & Vida Cross

The Poetry Center of Chicago will host a reading to close their Poetry in the Parks Reading Series in partnership with Read/Write Library and Chicago Water Taxi featuring Aaron Coleman and Vida Cross.

Chicago Water Taxi Michigan stop

located between Trump International Hotel & Tower and the Wrigley Building

at the start of The Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue.

5-6:20 Taxi

The water taxi will depart at 5:45 for a discounted rate of $2.50 per person

6:20- 8 Ping Tom Memorial Park

1700 S Wentworth Ave, Chicago, IL 60616

Our poets will read a poem each on the Water Taxi at 6 PM and then we will all get off at the Chinatown stop at 6:20, which is located on the South Branch of the Chicago River right in the heart of the beautiful, 12-acre Ping Tom Memorial Park. At the park, we will be greeted by Read/Write Library’s BiblioTreka, a pop-up library bicycle of carefully curated books and our poets will continue to share their work.

Aaron Coleman is the author of St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize and Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2018). A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem fellow from Metro-Detroit, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Kalamazoo, Chicago, St. Louis, Spain, and South Africa. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Apogee, Boston Review, Fence, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Contest and The Cincinnati Review Robert and Adele Schiff Award, Aaron is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in Washington University in St. Louis’ Comparative Literature PhD program.

Vida Cross received her MFA in Writing and MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in English from Iowa State University, and a BA in English-writing and BA in History from Knox College. She is a Cave Canem Fellow (2007 to 2013 ) and was recognized as the 2010 Honorable Mention for my book manuscript “Bronzeville at Night: 1945.” Her work has appeared in Tabula Poetica with Chapman University, Transitions with the WEB Institute of African American Research at Harvard University, the Cave Canem Anthology XII: Poems 2008-2009, The Literary Review with Fairleigh Dickinson University, Reed Magazine at Reed College, and The Journal of Film and Video from The University of Illinois, Chicago. Her work references her ancestry as a Chicagoan, Bronzeville resident, the art work of Archibald J. Motley Jr. and the poetic research of Langston Hughes.

Join The Poetry Center of Chicago on August 31, 2017 from 5:00 to 6:20 on the Chicago Water Taxi for $2.50 per person (cash or credit) for a reading with Aaron Coleman and Vida Cross and at 6:20 to 8 p.m. at Ping Tom Memorial Park for book perusing and chatting with Read/Write Library’s BiblioTreka.

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