Please join us for the next BONFIRE reading, featuring Camille Rankine, Clare Beams, and Cate Peebles, with music by Drew Collins!
Friday, November 15th@ 6:30pm
5814 Black Street
(Borland Garden in East Liberty)
Born in Portland, Oregon, poet Camille Rankine earned a BA at Harvard University and an MFA at Columbia University. Rankine’s nimble, urgent poems are often concerned with landscape, history, and intimacy. She is the author of the poetry collection Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon, 2015) and the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire (2011), which was chosen by poet Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. In his 2010 introduction to her work in the Academy of American Poets journal American Poet, Eady states, “Almost all the poems in Slow Dance [w]ith Trip Wire seem to occur in an ever-present, ever-widening past tense. The private and public, the light and dark, and the spirit and “normal” worlds co-mingle freely, sometimes stanza by stanza, at times almost line by line.” In an interview with Marietta Papic for 12 Questions, Rankine states, “I tell the truth, but I try to be kind about it.” Rankine’s honors include a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary Cave Canem Fellowship. She has served on the staff of the Cave Canem Foundation. She is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, serves as editorial director for the online literary journal The Manhattanville Review, and sings with the band Miru Mir.
Clare Beams is the author of the novel The Garden, published by Doubleday in 2024. It has been longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize and featured on anticipated lists at LitHub and Bookshop.org. Her novel The Illness Lesson was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a best book of February by Time, O Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, was published by Lookout Books in 2016; it won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, Conjunctions, The Common, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has received special mention in The Pushcart Prize and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and currently teaches in the Randolph MFA program.
Cate Peebles is the author of the poetry collections The Haunting (Tupelo Press, forthcoming) and Thicket (Lost Roads Press, 2018), and several chapbooks including Sun King (Factory Hollow Press, forthcoming), the editors’ choice selection for the 2024 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and The Woodlands (Sixth Finch Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including: The American Poetry Review, Bayou, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, diode, Ghost Proposal, Ploughshares, Volt, and elsewhere. Peebles is a coeditor of the occasional online poetry magazine Fou (foumagazine.net) and professional archivist, and is currently a doctoral student in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh.
Limited seating. Kids welcome! RSVP on BONFIRE's FB event page (though seating is first come, first served). Check out Guillermo Parra's blog on Best American Poetry about the Bonfire Series!