Charles Alexander and Susan Thackrey

Charles Alexander

Charles Alexander is an artist, poet, bookmaker and founder/director of Chax Press. He has written five full-length books of poetry, including Pushing Water (Cuneiform Press), and 10 chapbooks of poetry, including Some Sentences Look for Some Periods (Little Red Leaves). He is also editor of a critical work on the state of the book arts in America and the author of multiple essays, articles and reviews. Alexander, a past winner of the Distinguished Arizona Artist Award, joined University of Houston, Victoria, in 2014 as poet and designer-in-residence, director of communications design and director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program.

Susan Thackrey

San Francisco poet Susan Thackrey began to compose poetry at age 3. She was an inaugural student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980 and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima. Thackrey has given invitational lectures on Duncan, Charles Olson and George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the Oppen conference in Buffalo, and most recently on Duncan’s The H.D. Book for The Poetry Center. Since reading Homer in Greek over a five-year period with Duncan and some of her poet contemporaries, an important and lively part of her life in poetry has almost always included variously focused and long-lived reading groups with other poets. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Five Fingers, Hambone, Talisman, Traverse and VOLT.