Introducing Copper Canyon’s Launch Party Livestream

Welcome to the first of Copper Canyon Press‘s weekly series of free livestreaming book launch readings in the month of April. The Launch Party Livestream series will introduce you to twelve brilliant new and forthcoming poetry collections—three Thursday readings, plus our Tuesday finale, beamed right to you at home. This first event features Ellen Bass, Monika Sok, and Mark Bibbins.

Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass’s newest book, Indigo, is forthcoming in early 2020. Among her previous books are Like a Beggar (2014) which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award, The Human Line (2007), and Mules of Love (2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (1973). Among her other honors are three Pushcart Prizes, the Pablo Neruda Prize, Larry Levis Prize, New Letters Prize, and Fellowships from the NEA and the California Arts Council. Her poetry appears frequently in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Bass is also co-author of the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988, 2008), and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (1996). A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and at the Santa Cruz County jails, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA program in writing at Pacific University.

Mark Bibbins
Mark Bibbins is the author of three books with Copper Canyon: 13th Balloon; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, named one of the best poetry collections of 2014 by Publishers Weekly; and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and The New School, where he co-founded LIT magazine, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and four volumes of The Best American Poetry. Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003), and was a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. He lives in New York City.

Monica Sok
Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. A Nail the Evening Hangs On is available from Copper Canyon. Her work has been recognized with a Discovery Prize from the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Jerome Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018–2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and also teaches poetry at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants and Banteay Srei in Oakland, California. She is originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.