Laura Wetherington & Hannah Ensor

I'm very pleased to be welcoming writer poets Laura Wetherington from Nevada and Hannah Ensor from Michigan, USA this month to do a residency here from 21 November.

Laura writes and teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada and with the International Writers' Collective. Her first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. The Brooklyn Rail called the book 'humble, folksy, romantic, tough, inventive, and not over-programmed.'  She has published four chapbooks: Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press); at the intersection of 3 (Dancing Girl Press), collaboratively written with Jill Darling and Hannah Ensor: Grief Is the Only Thing That Flies (Bateau Press), which Arielle Greenberg selected for the Keel Chapbook Contest; and most recently, Little Machines (Salò Press). 

Hannah is a poet and essayist working around topics of Pop culture, sports, queer television and mass media, her first book of poetry is Love Dream with Television (Noemi Press 2018)
With Natalie Diaz she served as joint associate editor of  Bodies Built for Game, an anthology of contemporary sports literature, and with Laura Wetherington and Jill Darling they co-wrote the collaborative poetry chapbook at the intersection of 3. In 2019 they won the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Their writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including the PEN Poetry Series, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Essay Daily, JUPITER88, and Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre. Hannah teaches courses on contemporary poetry, creative writing and contemporary sports literature at the University of Michigan’s Residential College and English Department. 

They say: 'In 2016 we were walking around together in the summertime in a place where neither of us lived. A lot was going on, as a lot is going on now, and we wanted to respond in some way other than a think piece. This led to the beginning of our book-length work in progress, Feel Episodes. We met as colleagues in a university-level live-learn literature programme and have, over the last 10 years, met semi-regularly to mediate; talk about teaching, poetry, queerness, life; and to write together. Now both parents (of young people - three and five year olds) who have spent the last six years living on different continents, we want to walk around together again in a place where neither of us lives, allowing our collaboration to organically extend into the community of Sudbury'.