Matt Hart, Dobby Gibson, & Russell Dillon

Wednesday, March 11th at 7:30

Russell Dillon was born in New York during the mid '70s and hasn't been able to get over it. However, in an effort to put the past behind him, he's attended a number of schools in various places, learned things at each one of them, and received degrees from Emerson College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared or is forth coming in Alligator Juniper, Big Bell,Forklift, Ohio, 5A.M. and Tight, among others. He currently lives in San Francisco, where he does almost everything life asks of him. A chapbook, Secret Damage,has just been released from Forklift, Ink.

Matt Hart is the author of Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and three chapbooks, Revelated (Hollyridge Press, 2005), SONNET, (H_NGM_NBooks, 2006), and Simply Rocket (Lame House Press, 2007). A new collaborative chapbook with poet Ethan Paquin, Deafening Leafening, is forthcoming from Pilot Books in 2009, as well as a manuscript entitled You Are Mist (available momentarily). Born in Evansville, Indiana in 1969, Hart studied philosophy at both Ball State University and Ohio University before going on to receive his MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His poems, reviews, and essays have been published in numerous journals, including The Agriculture Reader, Conduit, Gulf Coast, The Harvard Review, Lungfull!, Ploughshares, and Spinning Jenny. Online his work can be seen in such journals as Coldfront, DIAGRAM, Fou, H_NGM_N, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Octopus, and TYPO. Six times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2003 for Best American Poetry, he was the 2007John Ciardi Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, as well as the 2005 Winter Residency Fellow at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In 1995 he co-founded Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking and Light Industrial Safety, which he still edits and co-publishes, and which, this Spring, will celebrate the publication its 20th issue. A twenty year veteran of the punk rock/alternative music scene, his music has appeared in major motion pictures and on MTV. He currently plays in the experimental noise-poetry band Travel and the Go-Kart records pop-punk band, Squirtgun. He has lived in Cincinnati, Ohio since 1993 where he is an Assistant Professor in the Academic Studies Department at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, a four year college of art and design. His wife Melanie teaches art at the Rees-Price Academy in Cincinnati Public schools. His daughter, Agnes, is two and thinks she's a hummingbird.

Dobby Gibson holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University. His poem shave appeared in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Fence, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a $25,000 McKnight Foundation poetry fellow-ship and two Pushcart nominations, as well as much critical acclaim for his first collection, Polar (Alice James Books). His new book, Skirmish, was just released from Gray wolf press.