Featured Readers
Carlos Cumpian is a Chicagoan originally from Texas. Human Cicada marks his fifth poetry collection: Coyote Sun (March Abrazo Press), Latino Rainbow (Children’s Press/Scholastic Books), Armadillo Charm (Tia Chucha Press), and 14 Abriles: Poems. In 2000, he was recognized with a Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poet Award. Cumpián has been included in more than thirty poetry anthologies, including the Norton Anthology Telling Stories. Before becoming a teacher, he worked with various social service organizations such as ASPIRA and public relations for the Chicago Public Library. Cumpián has taught creative writing and poetry through community arts organizations including the National Museum of Mexican Art and Urban Gateways and as a writer-in residence funded by the Illinois Arts Council. Cumpián taught in the English Department of Columbia College Chicago and in the Chicago Public School and Charter school system. In addition, he has hosted live readings with Galeria Qui Que & La Palabra Series and published over 20 poets/writers with MARCH ABRAZO PRESS between 1978-2015. His most recent essay, “Learned to Read at My Momma’s Knee,” appears in With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). His first in a series of true supernatural accounts, “A Chicago Premonition” was published in Hombre Lobo #2, True Xicanax Spooky Stories, (Ponte Las Pilas Press, Los Angles, Ca. 2021). Cumpián is currently working on his “anti-war years” memoir Accidental Rebel: 1968-1976.
Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts to rethink the way language shapes our relation to built and natural environments. Her poetry unfolds in counterpoint to documentary research. Recent books include The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (2016) and Belladonna Elders Series: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, 2009). As translator she has published Locomotrix, devoted to the poet-refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli (2012). Scappettone has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the Janiculum Hill to Fresh Kills Landfill. She teaches at the University of Chicago.