Boxes: a work in progress - Reading & Artist Talk with Amanda Johnston and Sasha West
| Event artist |
Join poet and visual arts, Amanda Johnston, for Boxes: a work in progress with special guest, Sasha West, for a reading and artist talk followed by a receiption and gallery showing.
Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, The Moth, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, American Short Fiction, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts.
Sasha West was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. It was also selected as one of ten debut books by Victoria Chang for Poets & Writers. Her second book, How to Abandon Ship, will be published by Four Way Books in spring 2024. She collaborates on multi-media, eco-arts exhibitions with visual artist Hollis Hammonds as the collaborative Hammonds + West. Their collaborations have been featured at Texas A&M University’s Wright Gallery, the Austin Public Library Central Gallery space, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, the College of the Mainland, ArtPrize2023 in Michigan, and the Columbus College of Art and Design. Her work has been collected in the anthologies The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood,Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse, Penned: Zoo Poems, and others. Individual poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Agni, American Poet, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Houston Arts Alliance grant, Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. She has served as lead editor for and, later, board president of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hudspeth Innovative Teaching Award. She lives in Austin, TX, with her husband and kid.
