Soft Bodies & Steel: A Reading with Jennifer Steinorth, Shannon K. Winston, and Lauren Carlson

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Boys Behind Glass, A Wake with Nine Shades, & Her Read, A Graphic Poem, recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Fred Whitehead Award and a Foreword Reviews prize in poetry. An interdisciplinary artist, poet, essayist & licensed builder, she lectures at the University of Michigan and commutes between Ann Arbor and Traverse City, where she's lived for 35 years. Her work has been supported by grants from the University of Michigan, Vermont Studio Center, the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College and Yale; she spins the O is for Octopus substack and is the biographer of CD Wright.

Shannon K. Winston is the author of The Worry Dolls (Glass Lyre Press, 2025) and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, Los Angeles Review, RHINO Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Lauren K. Carlson is a mother of three, recently relocated to the northwest coast of Michigan’s lower peninsula, after spending a decade in the remote prairies of Minnesota. A trained spiritual director, she is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the author of Steelhead and Animals I Have Killed. Lauren serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and is the recipient of the 2021 Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers.