Poetry at Literati: Michelle Penaloza: Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, and Bill Carty: Huge Cloudy

Michelle Peñaloza is the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize (Inlandia Books, 2019). She is also the author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her work can be found in River Styx, Prairie Schooner, upstreet, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, and Hugo House as well as the 2019 Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award for Poetry from The Key West Literary Seminar. Michelle has also received support from Artist Trust, Lemon Tree House, Caldera, 4Culture, Vermont Studio Center, Literary Arts, VONA/Voices, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among others. The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, MI and raised in Nashville, TN. She now lives, farms, and writes in rural Northern California.

Bill Carty lives in Seattle and is the author of HUGE CLOUDY (Octopus Books, 2019) and the chapbook Refugium(Alice Blue Books). He has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, and the Richard Hugo House. His poems have recently appeared (or will soon) in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Willow Springs, Conduit, Oversound, and other journals.