Frames of Reference: Poetry Brenda Shaughnessy, Erika Meitner and Nithy Kasa

Brenda Shaughnessy is the Okinawan-Irish American author of seven poetry collections, including The Octopus Museum, which was a New York Times 2019 Notable Book, Tanya, (Knopf, 2023, Bloodaxe 2024) and Liquid Flesh: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2022.) 

Recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the James Laughlin Award. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in West Orange, New Jersey.

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in 2022. Meitner’s poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, and T.S. Eliot House. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA program in Creative Writing.

Nithy Kasa is a Congolese-Irish poet whose work is featured on the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation website, the University of Galway’s archive, the Special Collections of University College Dublin, Poetry Ireland Review and others. Her debut collection of poetry, Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho, Doire Press 2022, was listed among the top poetry books of 2022 by the Irish Times, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023. Nithy is also a facilitator registered with the Irish Writers Centre.