The newest reading series from Bull City Press brings you poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from established and emerging writers for free on the second Saturday each month.

This month featuring: Michael Keenan Gutierrez & John Hoppenthaler with Niyanta Kunal Patel

Michael Keenan Gutierrez is the author of The Trench Angel (Leapfrog) and earned degrees from UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Delmarva Review, The Collagist, Scarab, The Pisgah Review, Pacifica, Untoward, The Boiler, and Crossborder. His screenplay, The Granite State, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival and he has received fellowships from The University of Houston and the New York Public Library.  He lives with his wife and child in Chapel Hill where he teaches writing at the University of North Carolina. His website is michaelkeenangutierrez.com

John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Lives of Water (2003), Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), and Domestic Garden (2015, winner of the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best volume of poetry published by a NC writer in 2015, chosen by Barbara Hamby), all with Carnegie Mellon University Press. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays and interviews on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U Michigan P, 2012). His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Barrow Street, and numerous other journals and anthologies. He received his MFA in Poetry Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. For the cultural journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, he edits “A Poetry Congeries,” and he is on the advisory board for Backbone Press, a small publisher dedicated to marginalized voices. For nine years he served as Personal Assistant to Toni Morrison. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.

Niyanta Kunal Patel is an emerging Indian-American poet and artist from Nashville, Tennessee. Niyanta is the inaugural UNC-Frost Place Publishing Fellow, and serves as an artist and designer for Bull City Press in Durham, North Carolina. They currently study neuroscience, chemistry, and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Find them on Twitter @temporalsplendr.