Join us for a live virtual reading with Matt Bodett, Amanda Goldblatt, Isaías Rogel, and Ricardo Mondragon. The Open Door series presents work from new and emerging poets and highlights writing instruction and poetic partnerships. Each event features readings by two Midwest based writers and two of their current or recent students or writing partners.

Born and raised in Idaho, Matt Bodett received his MFA from Boise State University in 2011. Seeking to dedicate himself more fully to a studio practice, he moved to Chicago in 2013. Since that time he has begun performing and exhibiting nationally and internationally. Bodett has created performance art work which has been exhibited at the Freud Museum in London, the No Limits Festival in Berlin, the Poetry Foundation, Steppenwolf Theater, and various other cultural institutions. Bodett has been a 3Arts and Bodies of Work Fellow, a resident at MacDowell, an incubator artist at High Concept Laboratories, and has received numerous grants and awards. He currently teaches at Loyola University Chicago, serves on the advisory board for the Institute for Therapy Through the Arts, and is on the Artist’s council for 3Arts Chicago.

Amanda Goldblatt’s work can be found at Guernica, Hobart, Fence, Diagram, and elsewhere. She was a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and teaches creative writing at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She is the author of the novel Hard Mouth (Counterpoint), and the chapbook Catalpa (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Website: https://amandagoldblatt.com/.

Isaías Rogel is an MFA student in New Mexico State University’s Creative Writing program and is pursuing a graduate certificate in the Borderlands and Ethnic Studies. As the prose editor for Puerto del Sol they advocate for queer Latinx writers and underrepresented writers of color. Their creative work is informed by 25+ years of living in the Humboldt Park and Hermosa neighborhoods of Chicago. Their fiction explores navigating an alternative queer Latinx identity in a hypermasculine Latinx community undergoing gentrification and processing/healing from intergenerational trauma.

Ricardo Mondragon’s work visualizes harmonies and materializes them. His work shows representations and executions of harmonic structures. Frequencies, vibrations, rhythms, particles, and modulations take form through sculptures, paintings, and installations. Each work is a representation of harmonic content, 3D Chladni, musical chords, intervals, standing waveforms and frequency entanglement. Mondragon’s process starts at the music studio using analog/digital musical instruments, and the most important tool: his computer. He dedicates his time building algorithms that imprint energy into visualizations of universal harmonies. His research is infinite as well as the stories, which are constantly evolving. Each of these artistic explorations is at the core of his work and it is his passion to continue developing interesting interrelationships between harmony, color, sound, light, and matter.

Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This reading will include live captioning and ASL interpretation. 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.

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Tags: Amanda Goldblatt, Chicago, Isaias Rogel, Matt Bodett, Near North Side, Open Door, Poetry Foundation, Ricardo Mondragon