Lit Youngstown presents a poetry reading by Manuel Iris & Mathias Svalina on Friday, April 1 at 7 PM. Many thanks to our wonderful hosts, the Soap Gallery.
Manuel Iris is recent Poet Laureate of the City of Cincinnati. He is the author of five books of poetry in Spanish and the bilingual book The Parting Present. He holds a BA in Latin American Literature from the Autonomous University of the Yucatan (Mexico), an MA in Spanish from New Mexico State University, and a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati.
This reading is part of an Artists Resiliency Initiative funded by the Ohio Arts Council, Rob Briggs & Alyssa Lenhoff Briggs.
Mathias Svalina is the author of seven books, most recently The Depression, a collaboration with the photographer Jon Pack published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. He is a founding editor of the small press Octopus Books & has taught creative writing in universities, high schools, community arts spaces, prisons, & libraries. Since 2014, he has run a dream delivery service: dreamdeliveryservice.com.
Description of the DDS: "With the Dream Delivery Service, I take subscribers, write daily dreams for them for a month, & deliver the dreams in little pink envelopes. The dreams consist of brief surrealist narratives; they are the subscriber's dreams, though I invent & write them. To subscribers in the city in which I’m located, I deliver the dreams by bicycle in the mornings. To those outside the city I mail them. Since 2016, the project has been nomadic, traveling from city to city as much, as I can, by bicycle.
With the Dream Delivery Service I’ve worked with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Austin Modern, Tucson MOCA, & the Just Buffalo Literary Center, among other organizations. The Dream Delivery Service has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, the BBC World News, Vice, & 60 Second Documentaries."