The Be Well Reading Series' Tribute to Maureen Seaton

ELJ Editions & Redacted Books present

The Be Well Reading Series' Celebration of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton

Hosted by Nicole Tallman with Special Guest Dustin Brookshire

Thursday, November 7, 7-8 p.m. EST via Zoom

Featured Readers:

Clayre Benzadón is a University of Miami MFA graduate student alumni and graduate of Brandeis University. She is currently a poetry reader from and 's Instagram editor. She is also the former Managing editor of Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith” was published by . She was awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for "Linguistic Rewilding". Additionally, her work has been featured in places including ANMLY, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, MudRoom Magazine, Pussy Magic, Kissing Dynamite, and other publications.

Emma Bolden is an Alabama native and a recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Her debut memoir, , was published by Soft Skull Press in 2022. , her third full-length collection of poetry, won the 2017 Cowles Poetry Book Prize and was published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in 2018. Her second full-length collection, medi(t)ations, is a book-length lyric essay/poetry hybrid published by Noctuary Press in 2016. Her first full-length collection, Maleficae, is a book-length series of poems about the witch trials in early modern Europe. Maleficae was a finalist for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize and the Cleveland State University Press First Book Award as well as a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize and the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes; it was published by GenPop Books in 2013. She is also the author of three chapbooks of poetry — How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), (Dancing Girl Press) and ) — and a nonfiction chapbook, (Winged City Press). Emma Bolden’s poetry and prose has appeared (or will soon appear) in such journals as the Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, New Madrid, the Mississippi Review, TriQuarterly, Story Quarterly, The Pinch, Waccamaw, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, the Indiana Review, the Greensboro Review, Redivider, Verse, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Guernica, and Copper Nickel. Bolden has been featured on Poetry Daily and on Verse Daily, and her work was chosen for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2015, Best American Poetry 2015, and The Norton Introduction to Literature (13th Edition). She was the winner of the 2009 Betty Gabehart Award for Nonfiction from the Kentucky Womens Writers Conference, the Yalobusha Review’s 2010 All-In Nonfiction Prize, the 2014 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose from Gulf Coast Magazine, the Spoon River Poetry Review’s 2014 Editor’s Prize, the Press 53/Prime Number Magazine 2014 Award for Flash Nonfiction, and So to Speak’s 2015 Feminist Poetry Contest. Bolden currently serves as an editor of the Screen Door Review. She previously served as Senior Reviews Editor and as Associate Editor-in-Chief at Tupelo Quarterly. She received a BLA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Regie Cabico’s work appears in more than thirty anthologies, including The Spoken Word Revolution (Sourcebooks, 2003); Chorus & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999); and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt and Company, 1994). He is the coeditor of Flicker & Spark: A Contemporary Anthology of Queer Poetry and Spoken Word (Lowbrow Press, 2013), which was nominated for a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Cabico is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and later won top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. He has served as the youth program coordinator for the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. He has also been a teaching artist with Kennedy Center Arts Education, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Tyler Gillespie is the author of the nonfiction collection (University Press of Florida, 2021) and two poetry collections — (Autofocus, 2023) and (Burrow Press, 2024). He is represented by Lauren MacLeod at Aevitas Creative Management. A former journalist, his reporting appears in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, GQ, VICE, The Daily Beast, Playboy, and other outlets. He’s the co-editor of (Skyhorse, 2016), and his humor writing can be found in , McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and LGBTQ Comedic Monologues That Are Actually Funny. Gillespie is a fifth-generation Floridian and wrote the introduction for A24’s . He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and a PhD in English: Writing, Rhetoric, & Technical Communication from the University of Memphis. In 2021, he won The X. A. Kramer, Jr. Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of Mississippi. He’s currently a Professor and Writing Program Coordinator at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasoat, FL.

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Maureen Therese Seaton (October 20, 1947 – August 26, 2023) was an American lesbian poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing.[1][2] She authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography.[3] Seaton's writing has been described as "unusual, compressed, and surrealistic," and was frequently created in collaboration with fellow poets such as Denise Duhamel, Samuel Ace, Neil de la Flor, David Trinidad, Kristine Snodgrass, cin salach, Niki Nolin, and Mia Leonin (FROM WIKIPEDIA)

When I Was Straight
When I was straight I dreamed of nipples,
my dreams were crowded with cleavage and yin,
I read a book that said if you are fickle

about sex, note your obsession in dreams
then do the opposite in real life. This
made sense, my boyfriend said, although it seemed

oddly like a game of Exquisite Corpse
to me. We'd make love, I'd dream of figs,
that drizzled pink, and sometimes I'd lapse

into madrigals (meaning: of the womb), big
leap from the straightforward sessions in bed
of linearity and menthol. Legs

would cross and uncross in my dreams, heads
fall back with me at the throat. I adored
the winged clavicle, that link between breast-

bone and scapula. Straight as gin, I poured
myself into pretense and fellatio,
you could count on me for bold orgasms, for

trapeze art and graceful aerobics, oh
there is no lover like a panicked lover.
Once I dreamed of abandoning the Old

Boyfriend Theory of Headache and Blunder-
buss. Believe me, I said, this will hurt him
more than me, but the dream laughed! Torture

me, I thought, now that even my id
has turned against me, there is something fragile
here to lose, exquisite truth, and I did.

Copyright © 2001 Maureen Seaton

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from
Invisible Cities Press

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