Poetry is Normal Presents Laura Bandy & Kara Dorris

Poetry is Normal Presents Laura Bandy & Kara Dorris

Tuesday, January 18, 2022, 7-8 p.m. via YouTube Live

Illinois poets Laura Bandy and Kara Dorris will read their work as part of Poetry is Normal Presents, the library’s guest poet series, supported by the Normal Public Library Foundation.

This YouTube Live event will also be archived on the library's YouTube channel.

Laura Bandy earned her MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2006, and attended the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers PhD program from 2009 to 2013, where she received the Joan Johnson Poetry Award. In 2018, she won first prize in the "Trio of Triolets" contest judged by Allison Joseph, and received third place in the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award/ Illinois Emerging Writers Competition that same year. Her chapbook, Hack, was published with Dancing Girl Press in summer 2021, and she has work forthcoming in The Florida Review, Driftwood Press, and Moist Journal. Laura is a member of the English faculty at Spoon River Community College. She hails from Jacksonville, Illinois, home of the Ferris wheel.

Kara Dorris is the author of two poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, I-70 Review, Southword, Rising Phoenix, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, Tinderbox, Puerto del Sol, The Tulane Review, and Crazyhorse, among others literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, Waxwing, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). She earned a MFA in creative writing at New Mexico State University and a PhD in literature and poetry at the University of North Texas. Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.