We're thrilled to have our popular National Poetry Month reading series return this year! Join us down the street at the Wine Café to hear from some of Minnesota's finest established and emerging poets—and enjoy a bite or a drink while you do. The April 19 reading will feature Candace Black, Marlin Jenkins, National Poetry Series winner (and MSU professor) Michael Torres, and Lindquist & Vennum Prize winner Claire Wahmanholm. Then, on April 26, we'll welcome National Endowment for the Arts fellow Michael Bazzett, Minnesota Book Award winner Su Hwang, Max Ritvo Poetry Prize winner Michael Kleber-Diggs, and National Book Award finalist (and Gustavus professor) Matt Rasmussen. Learn more about the poets below.

Michael Bazzett is the author of four books of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021), and the chapbook The Temple (Bull City, 2020). Recent work has appeared in Granta, Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Sun, The Nation, and The Paris Review, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed, 2018) was named one of 2018’s best books of poetry by the NY Times. His next translation project, If Today Were Tomorrow, the selected poems of Humberto Ak'abal, is forthcoming from Milkweed. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, he lives in Minneapolis. 

Su Hwang is a poet, activist, stargazer, and the author of Bodega, published by Milkweed Editions, which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was named a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of America Poets James Wright Prize, and writer-in-residence fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others. Her essay “Why the Rebellion Had to Begin Here,” originally published in Literary Hub, was included in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, published by Vintage Books in May 2021, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (he / him / his) is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies.

Matt Rasmussen is the author of Black Aperture, winner of the 2012 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Loft Literary Center, the Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, and the McKnight Foundation. He is the cofounder of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC and teaches literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College.

This project is made possible with money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the people of Minnesota for Library Legacy activities.