New American Writing: Vanessa Place and Martha Ronk

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa, and co-author of Notes on Conceptualisms in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman. Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published in 2010. Martha Ronk is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Vertigo, a National Poetry Series Selection, and In a landscape of having to repeat, winner of the PENUSA best poetry book 2005. She has had residencies at Djerassi and at The MacDowell Colony and received a NEA in 2007. Glass Grapes and other stories, is her first collection of fiction.

A series of contemporary fiction and poetry readings organized by Benjamin Weissman, author of two books of short fiction, most recently Headless, and professor of creative writing at Art Center College of Design and Otis College of Art and Design.