Reading at Red Room October 5 w/Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Roberta Allen

Ali Cobby Eckermann Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is the author of seven books, including the verse novel Ruby Moonlight, the poetry collection Inside My Mother, and the memoir Too Afraid to Cry. In 2017 she was awarded Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize in Poetry.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian civil war survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991 during the fourteen-year Liberian civil war. She is the author of five books of poetry: When the Wanderers Come Home, (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Where the Road Turns (Autumn House Press, 2010), The River is Rising (Autumn House Press, 2007), Becoming Ebony, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003) and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Press, 1998). She is also the author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea, (One Moore Books, 2012) Her poem, “One Day: Love Song for Divorced Women” was selected by US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, as an American Life in Poetry June 13, 2011, featured poem. Patricia has won several awards and grants, including a 2016 WISE Women Award from Blair County, Pennsylvania, 2011 President’s Award from the Blair County NAACP, the 2010 Liberian Award for her poetry and her mentorship of young Liberians in the Diaspora, a Penn State University AESEDA Collaborative Grant for her research on Liberian Women’s Trauma stories from the Civil War, a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second book of poems, a World Bank Fellowship, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Awards. Her individual poems and memoir articles have been anthologized and published in literary magazines in the US, in South America, Africa, and Europe, and her work has been translated into Spanish and Finnish. Patricia holds a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University’s Altoona campus.
A short story writer, novelist, and memoirist, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books. Her latest is the story collection The Princess of Herself  (Pelekinesis Press). Over 300 of her stories have been published in such magazines as Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail and The Collagist, among many others. She is also a conceptual artist in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum. www.robertaallen.com
Tim Tomlinson is co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He is also the author of Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), and This Is Not Happening to You (short fiction), which he’ll be launching at tonight’s reading. His work has appeared in Australia, China, Singapore, and the Philippines, and is anthologized in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Long Island Noir, and We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow. He teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program, NYU.