Elizabeth Quarles

Elizabeth’s Reading

Elizabeth’s reading of “A Very Precocious Thought You Will Never Hear”

Elizabeth’s Artist Statement


This is poem that I drafted over and over again and the final version captured that feeling of wanting something so much  you hate it. It originally started as a poem about having to clean my shower but I think it turned into something interesting. 

Some of Elizabeth’s Research

Elizabeth on “Lesbianism in Early Modern Pornography”

Elizabeth discusses her research

Elizabeth’s Independent Study Research

Elizabeth on “Erotic Whales”

Elizabeth describes her independent study research

Connor Simonson

Connor’s Reading

Connor’s reading

Connor’s Artist Statement

In “The Desert Show” I want to immerse the reader into the whirlwind of Vegas nightlife. If you spend enough time at the right casino bar, observing the scene through your own objective eyes, everyone will come away with a different story. This poem is mine.

Jackson Hamilton

Jackson’s Introductory Statement

This is a short number of poems from two sections of a poetry album from 2016 to 2021, covering the Trump Era. All of them were political but some more subtly. In total, the full album has over 160 poems and this is only a short selection. Each selection does not fit neatly in to one another but they do fit and their fitting is for the audience to dissect. It was going to be recorded but a lack of recording equipment prevented this from happening. I kept their numbers in the album and the dates written.

Jackson’s Selection of Poetry

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Rachel Foertsch

Rachel’s Reading

Rachel Foertsch’s “Mask of Concern”

Rachel’s Artist Statement

This is an excerpt from my piece about a 19-year-old girl with a difficult home life, and her 30-year-old boss who uses her emotional state to take advantage of her. It was challenging because I put a lot of myself into it, and while the work is fiction, the emotions are real. I hope it elicits feelings from readers, no matter what those feelings are.

Tony Ferrese

Tony’s Reading

Tony Ferrese’s “The Leap Year Tragedy”

Tony’s Artist Statement

This is the most recent story I have written, and it is largely different from almost everything I have written prior. For this story, I wanted to focus on characters; I made character development my goal this semester, as my tendency in writing is a focus on plot or the intention of the story. I figured, what better way to force myself to focus on characters then by writing a story from multiple perspectives, all which eventually intersect serendipitously? The result is
“The Leap Year Tragedy.”

Mathieu Caceres

Mathieu’s Reading

Mathieu Caceres, “The Biography in the Colophon”

Mathieu’s Artist Statement

I wrote this poem as a sort of companion piece to Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Dezembrum,” which also features a similar structure: five quatrains. I usually do not structure my poems this way but in reading Stevens, I wanted to try something different, or rather, an emulation of, in the words of Theodore Roethke, “our father.”