Woodland Pattern

Woodland Pattern is proud to be a 2026 general operating grant recipient of the Literary Arts Fund!
Thank you for helping us champion a lifetime practice of reading, writing, and poetry.

⭐Link in bio for the full announcement⭐

📖 Poetry Reading: Michael Imossan 📖

THURS, June 4, 6:30 pm CDT
*OFF-SITE* at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N Downer Ave., Milwaukee
Free with registration
[Link in profile]

We are co-hosting this event with Boswell Book Company to welcome Michael Imossan, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for first full-length collection, All That Refuses to Die.

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Imossan's debut collection brims with stories and memories that evoke as well as provoke. As he moves through historical places, the poet compares the past with the present and finds that nothing has really changed. Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean.

Poet Fady Joudah says: "Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true.”

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Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet of Ibibio origin. He is curator of the poetry column for Nigerian NewsDirect, poetry editor for the Chestnut Review, and author of the chapbooks For the Love of Country and Memory and The Smell of Absence, which was selected for inclusion in Kumi Na Moja: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set. He is a recipient of a PEN International writers’ grant.

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Each week, 📻 Woodland Pattern Radio 📻 broadcasts selections from nearly five decades of Woodland Pattern’s visiting poets, artists and musicians. And monthly, we re-share an episode from the glimmering depths of our archive.

Today we revisit episode 23: Merrill Gilfillan (2024) & Tom Raworth (2012)

This episode presents poet and alfresco essayist Merrill Gilfillan’s full Sunday, March 31, 2024 virtual reading for the North Central reading series, followed by a clip from Tom Raworth’s 2012 Woodland Pattern visit. Our intro music features the Mike Reed Ensemble and closing music features poet Tom Raworth on the music box in collaboration with Milwaukee saxophonist Steve Nelson-Raney.

Thank you as always for tuning in.

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We invite you to check out the Woodland Pattern Radio Hour page for more archived episodes, and visit Woodland Pattern on SoundCloud to hear the full programs from which these readings and concerts were broadcast.

For new episodes: Tune in at WXRW 104.1 if you’re in the neighborhood, or stream from anywhere via the Riverwest Radio website each Saturday 6-6:30PM CT.

[All links in bio]

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