Come celebrate National Poetry Month & the Indianapolis release of Nancy Chen Long’s ‘Light into Bodies,’ winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Long will be joined by poets Rachel Sahaidachny and J.T. Whitehead.

Nancy Chen Long, a 2017 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellow in poetry, is the author of Light into Bodies, winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry (University of Tampa Press, 2017) as well as Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You’ll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bat City Review, Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, and elsewhere. As a volunteer with the local Writers Guild, Nancy coordinates a reading series and works with others to offer free poetry workshops to the public. To give back to the writing community at-large, she reviews poetry books and interview poets at the blog Poetry Matters (readwritepoetry.blogspot.com), as well as on her blog nancychenlong.blogspot.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned an MFA. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. www.nancychenlong.com
Praise for Light Into Bodies:
“Nancy Chen Long’s poems are lush, meditative, and quietly urgent. With lines that are lyrically charged and haunted by the past, these poems long to be heard and carried in the ear. Here are poems that are not afraid of beauty, or silence, or to know, “Dust is never an option. I have no need to hide.” “~Ada Limón

Rachel Sahaidachny holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Butler University. She was a finalist in the 2016 Radar Poetry Coniston Prize, awarded first prize in the Wabash Watershed Indiana Poetry Awards, and twice nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Award. She is co-editor of Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, and former poetry editor of Booth: A Journal. Recent writing has been published in Southeast Review, Radar Poetry, Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Red Paint Hill, Nuvo, Indiana Humanities, and others. She works as programs manager for the Indiana Writers Center in Indianapolis.

J.T.Whitehead has traveled in Holland, France, Hong Kong, and China, and has studied in the U.K. Whitehead’s work has appeared in Left Curve, the Lilliput Review, and Gargoyle. He is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and the winner of the 2015 Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. He is also the Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. His collection of poetry The Table of the Elements (Broadkill River Press 2015) was nominated for the National Book Award. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and two sons, where he practices law by day, and writes poetry by night.