Join us for a live virtual reading with Beth McDermott and her student Eva Bruno, and Maya Marshall and student Katharine Grace de Jesus Flores. The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This reading will include live captioning. If you require any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing events@poetryfoundation.org. To find out more about Zoom’s own built-in accessibility features, please visit https://zoom.us/accessibility.

Beth McDermott is a writer in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Her chapbook, How to Leave a Farmhouse, was published by Porkbelly Press. Recent poetry, reviews and criticism appear in Kenyon Review Online, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Trumpeter. Essays and reviews about art and ecology can be found in After the Art, American Book Review, the Spoon River Poetry Review blog and Kudzu House Quarterly, where she was also Poetry Editor. She is currently an Associate Editor with RHINO and working on a manuscript of prose poetry titled If You Say So. Beth holds degrees from Hope College, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She teaches writing and literature courses at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL, where she’s an Assistant Professor of English and coordinator of the St. Francis Writers’ Conference, for which she received an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant in 2017.

Eva Bruno is a senior studying English and Education at the University of St. Francis. Bruno’s poetry was recognized in the 17th Annual Sr. Rose Marie Surwilo Poetry Contest, receiving second place overall. She was also honored as a Google Cloud Academic All-American in 2019 for excelling both in the classroom and on the University of St. Francis track and field team. Although Bruno currently resides in the Joliet area, she is originally from rural Seneca, IL, and plans to return there to teach following her graduation in 2021.

Maya Marshall, a writer and editor, is cofounder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall is a Fall 2020 artist-in-residence at Northwestern University and holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem. She is the author of Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her writing appears in Best New Poets 2019, Muzzle Magazine, RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books. Her first full-length book is forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

Katharine Grace de Jesus Flores studies English and Environmental Science at Loyola University Chicago. Influenced by her first-generation Filipinx-American upbringing, Katharine intends on continuing her studies in English with a concentration in 20th Century American Literature by authors of color. She aspires to work in academia, bringing BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and immigrant identities into general education.

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Tags: Beth McDermott, Chicago, Eva Bruno, Katharine Grace de Jesus Flores, Maya Marshall, Near North Side, Open Door Series Online, Poetry Foundation