On Sept 30th, KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series presents award winning poets Adrian Matejka, Erin Belieu, and Kevin Prufer.
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His fourth collection is Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017). His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.
Erin Belieu’s poetry collection, Come-Hither Honeycomb, was published in February 2021. Belieu's other poetry collections are Infanta, winner of the National Poetry Series, and chosen one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, National Book Critics Circle, and Library Journal; One Above & One Below, winner of the Midland Author’s and Ohioana Poetry Prizes; Black Box, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Slant Six, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was named by the New York Times’s book critic’s one of their 10 Favorite Books of 2014. All of Belieu’s poetry collections are published by Copper Canyon Press. Belieu’s poetry has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poet's Poem a Day, and the American Poetry Review. Her poems have been selected on multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. Her prizes include the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship, and she was recently honored with the Barnes and Noble "Writers For Writers Award, recognizing Belieu’s long career of literary activism, as well as AWP’s George Garrett Prize, honoring her "outstanding literary citizenship” in service to the national writing community.
Kevin Prufer's newest poetry collection, The Fears, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023 and received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His new novel Sleepaway was published in 2024 by Acre Books. He is also the author of several other books of poetry, including The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem(2008), all from Four Way Books. He's edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/Martha Collins). Among Prufer's awards and honors are five Pushcart prizes and several Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press. Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.
The KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series, now in its 27th year, brings together nationally recognized, award winning, established and emerging poets to New York and gives them a mic in the legendary KGB Bar. We aim to provide New York audiences with the best, most compelling, accomplished, diverse, and original poets representative of the current American climate. Originally created by David Lehman and Star Black, the series is now hosted by John Deming, Jada Gordon, Tyler Allen Penny, and Susan Lewis.