Archive Text: Writers’ Workshop graduates Caryl Pagel and Madeline McDonnell will read from their poetry and fiction. Caryl Pagel read from her book of poetry, Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death. “Reading Caryl’s poems is a distinct privilege—for hers is a poetry that attends to difficulty in difficult ways. … One feels in Caryl’s work that the only answer is to read the next poem—to trust that the effort of making meaning, of sowing meaning, of raising and razing meaning, never accomplished in any single poem, builds into an accumulating whole that does profound good.“ – Dan Beachy-Quick

Caryl Pagel’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Devil’s Lake, H_NG M_N, and MAKE Magazine. She teaches writing at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and works for Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She is also the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press.

Madeline McDonnell reads from the hot off the presses, Penny, n. —a novella/lexicographic experiment. Madeline McDonnell is also the author of There Is Something Inside, It Wants to Get Out, a collection of three stories. Other stories have recently appeared in Harvard Review,Kenyon Review Online, and CutBank. A former lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she teaches creative writing in New York City and Iowa City.

“Madeline McDonnell writes shrewdly, responsively, inventively, audaciously, arrestingly. She approaches the story as a hang-glider approaches the wind, bending herself to its movements.” – Kevin Brockmeier