The 4 x 4 Reading

Four friends. Four poets. Four readings. Bring your forelocks and foreheads, your forks and your forceps, as John Fry, Meg McKeon, Claire Bowman, and Leanna Petronella put some of their new work forward. (They thank you in advance for the forbearance with their puns.)

Originally from South Texas, John Fry is the author of with the dogstar as my witness (Orison Books, 2018), which was a finalist for the Orison Poetry Prize, the Dorset Prize, and the Nightboat Poetry prize. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, West Branch, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waxwing, among others. He edits poetry for Newfound Journal, studies medieval literature as a doctoral candidate at UT-Austin, and lives in the Texas Hill Country. 

Meg McKeon received her MFA from The University of Texas - Austin's New Writers Project in 2013. She went on to pursue an MEd at UT and currently teaches 8th grade English Language Arts here in Austin, TX.

Claire Bowman is a poet from Missouri. She earned a BA in English from Truman State University, and an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. Her chapbook, Dear Creatures was published by Sutra Press in the fall of 2017. Her work can be found in Deluge, PANK, Narrative Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is an Editor at Host Publications, and a tarot card reader with Typewriter Tarot in Austin, Texas. 

Leanna Petronella’s debut collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and will be forthcoming in October 2019. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, and other publications. Her fiction appears in Drunken Boat, and her nonfiction appears in Brevity. She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She lives in Austin, Texas.