Illinois State University’s Publications Unit will host a launch and reading for the new chapbooks Meditations on Leaving by Emily Ronay Johnston and Just Some Punk Kid by Laurel L. Perez at 7 p.m. (doors at 6:45 p.m.) Tuesday, May 2 in Williams Hall Annex on campus. The event is free and open to the public.
Mediations on Leaving by Emily Ronay Johnston
Publishing Studies students in English 254, Introduction to Professional Publishing, have been working as production assistants for PRESS 254, the handmade chapbook press at the Publications Unit in the Department of English. The event celebrates the semester-long hard work put in by the English 254 students to prepare, design, produce, and hand stitch the chapbooks as well as the unique poetry of the authors and will feature readings by both Johnston and Perez. The readings will be followed by a reception where coffee and light snacks will be served. The hand-stitched chapbooks will be available for purchase from the Publications Unit for 2 for $10 (singles for $7).
Johnston holds a Ph.D. in English from Illinois State University and a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Alaska–Fairbanks. Her work develops at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, poetics, and narrativity. She is managing editor of SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review) and a postdoctoral researcher in writing pedagogy at the University of Delaware.
Just Some Punk Kid by Laurel Perez
Perez is an instructor of composition and a Ph.D. student at Illinois State University. Her concentrations are in poetry, creative nonfiction, and composition and rhetoric. She has poetry published in Literary Orphans online journal, and is currently working on a manuscript titled: The Pressure Of: A Meditation on Damage.
For more information or to purchase copies of the chapbooks, contact Holms Troelstrup, assistant director of the Publications Unit, at jhtroel@IllinoisState.edu or (309) 438-3025.
