March 30, 2013, Saturday - A Reading by Minnesota State Arts Board Grant Winners at The Loft

Tme: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South

A Reading by Minnesota State Arts Board Grant Winners

The Loft Literary Center hosts a reading by recipients of a 2012 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Reading will be fiction writer Nona Kennedy Carlson and poets Heid Erdrich and Kate Lynn Hibbard.

Nona Kennedy Carlson is the recipient of a 2011-2012 Loft Mentor Series Award, a 2012 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, and a 2012 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, temenos, Dust and Fire, The Talking Stick, and Minnpost. In 2012 her story, "Shift," was selected by Joyce Carol Oates as a finalist for the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize and her short story "Queer" received the Jonis Agee Award for fiction. She is currently at work on Boom, a novel in stories set against the backdrop of the Bakken Oil Boom and the war in Iraq.

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems. She is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant for 2012-2013. Her grant allowed her to produce new poems and create poetry films with Elizabeth Day, Margaret Noori, R. Vincent Moniz, Jr., and animator Jonathan Thunder. Her poem films will be screened as part of this event.

Kate Lynn Hibbard's first book of poems Sleeping Upside Down won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Sliverfish Press. Her second collection, Sweet Weight, was published by Tiger Bark Press in 2012. She is editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwestern Experience. Her honors include the Aestrea Foundation's Lesbian Writing Finalist Award, a McKnight Artist Fellowship in Poetry, two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and residencies at Hedgebrook and the Cornucopia Arts Council. She is working on a manuscript of historical poetry about women's experiences in the Great Plains frontier.

This activity is made possible in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.