Ed Pavlic and David Lau: Reading and in Conversation

Ed Pavlić

Ed Pavlić’s new books are Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015) and “Who Can Afford to Improvise?”: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press, 2015). Recent works are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press, 2008). His other books are Paraph of Bone and Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006). He teaches at University of Georgia.

David Lau

Poet David Lau grew up in Long Beach. He has described his family as a “Chicano-Chinese and Anglo household.” He earned degrees from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The poems in his first book, Virgil and the Mountain Cat (2009), were described by The Believer’s Dominic Luxford as “simultaneously creative and destructive … grounded in — or rather, trapped by — the present. …” Chosen as a Poetry Society of America New American Poet, Lau himself described his own goals for poetry: “The force field of allusion need be maximal in this poetry: a harmony of the low and high, of social inequality and natural abundance.” Lau is also the author of the chapbook Bad Opposites (2012). With Cal Bedient, he edits the journal Lana Turner. Lau was a featured writer for Harriet in April 2014.

Photo of Ed Pavlić by Rob Stothard