Observable Readings: Adrian Matejka & Erin Belieu

The reading will be streamed live to this event page and to St. Louis Poetry Center’s Facebook page.

Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka is a graduate of the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden, which won the New York / New England Award; Mixology, a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series; and The Big Smoke, winner of the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. His most recent collection is Map to the Stars, and his new collection of poems Somebody Else Sold the World will be published by Penguin in July 2021. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Bellagio Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington and served as Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018-19. 

Erin Belieu

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press. Her books include Infanta, winner of the National Poetry Series; Black Box, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Slant Six, a New York Times’ Favorite Books Of The Year selection in 2014; and her recent collection, published in February this year, Come-Hither Honeycomb. Belieu’s work has appeared in many places, including the New Yorker, Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and has been selected for multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. Winner of the Rona Jaffe Fellowship, the George Garrett Prize and the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Prize, Belieu teaches in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program Faculty and the Lesley low residency MFA program in Cambridge, MA.