This is a past event.

Coming UP Verse: Remote Revivals in Poetry & Song is an evening of poetry and music, featuring poetry by Ashley M. Jones, M. Bartley Seigel, Tyler Dettloff, April Lindala, & Kimberly Ann Priest; with an introduction by Raphael Xavier; & special musical guests, Ani & Kora. This hybrid event will feature both in-person and virtual performances in front of a limited, live audience. 

Coming UP Verse: Remote Revivals in Poetry & Song, is part of the Raphael Xavier Digital Residency at the Rozsa. This program is sponsored by the the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts; the College of Sciences & Arts; The Multiliteracies Center; the Department of Humanities; and by the Visiting Professor Program which is funded by a grant to the Office of the Provost from the State of Michigan's King-Chavez-Parks Initiative.

Tyler Dettloff is a one-man blues band, poet, author of Belly-up Rosehip: a Tongue Blue with Mud Songs, and recently released his sophomore LP Dynamite Honey: Northern Folk & Blues from Lost Dog Records. Hailing from the Delirium Wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he teaches English Composition and Native American Literature courses at Lake Superior State University. 

Ashley M. Jones is the author of dark//thing and REPARATIONS NOW! (forthcoming from Hub City Press). Her poetry regularly appears in journals such as POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, and Fjords Review, among many other. She directs the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and is also a member of the Core Faculty at the Converse College Low Residency MFA Program. She is currently serving as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine. 

April E. Lindala is a bead artist, singer, and powwow dancer, and her creative writing appears in The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works, Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and My Home as I Remember. She also co-edited Mikwendaagozi: To Be Remembered, The Decolonizing Diet Project Cookbook, and Voice on the Water; Great Lakes Native America Now. She is a professor of Native American Studies at Northern Michigan University and is working towards a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture at Michigan Technological University. She lives in Marquette, Michigan.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, Parrot Flower, Still Life, and White Goat Black Sheep. Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Borderland and many others. She is an associate professor of First-Year Writing at MSU, associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and Embody reader for The Maine Review.

M. Bartley Seigel is U.P. Poet Laureate, author of This Is What They Say, founding editor-in-chief of Simple Machines Magazine, and founding editor emeritus of PANK Magazine. His poetry regularly appears in journals such as Fourth River, Michigan Quarterly Review, Split Rock Review, Thrush, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and literature and directs the writing center at Michigan Technological University. He lives in Houghton, Michigan, in Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory.

Ani & Kora are a singer song-writer, multi-instrumentalist, folk punk duo from Houghton, Michigan. Old on soul and sharp as a tack, their music is inspired by their home in the Keweenaw Peninsula, by the roots and Americana music they were raised on, and all served up with a pinch of hot club swing. They’ve performed live on stage with the likes of May Erlewine, Josh Davis, The Accidentals, and this spring they’ll graduate from high school.