MFA Writing Program Visiting Artist Series: CAConrad

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: The son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.  He is the author of A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). He is a 2011 Pew Fellow, a 2012 Ucross Fellow, and a 2013 BANFF Fellow. He is the editor of the online video poetry journals JUPITER 88 and Paranormal Poetics.  Visit him at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com. About mentors and coming to poetry, CA says, I loved [Anne Sexton] as a kid. For the record, I dislike the confessional poets, every suicidal one of them. My work is not about wallowing in posttraumatic stress disorder, it’s about posttraumatic stress growth.