Paradiso XXI: Cass Donish and Kristi Stout

It’s gonna be a banger.

CASS DONISH: Queer poet and writer Cass Donish is the author of the poetry collections Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024); The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was selected for publication by Maggie Nelson. Their writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Donish received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri. They teach creative writing at Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program and through Tin House Workshops. Donish lives on the unceded ancestral lands of the Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria, Očeti Šakowin (Sioux), Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, Illini-Peoria, and other Indigenous peoples who were unjustly and forcibly displaced, in a place also known as Columbia, Missouri. @cassdonish

KRISTI STOUT: Kristi is a writer and a teacher living in Durham. Her work can be found in Poetry, The Rumpus, Hood of Bone, and elsewhere. @kristi.kreme

$10-15 suggested donation. Doors at 6:30 pm, reading at 7 pm.  BYO or sample what’s on hand.