BRIDGES READING SERIES
THIRD THURSDAY OF THE MONTH 6:30 PM
Register Here to Join us. 

Bridges Reading series November 19, 2020
“Three new books, two of them first publications, highlight the Bridges Reading for November,”
Says host /curator Stan Kusunoki. “It should be a wide-ranging and lively reading.”
Since this is a Zoom reading, those who wish to view it should register with Next Chapter
Booksellers to get the link sent to them.

The roster includes:
Roy G. Guzmán was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and grew up in Miami, Florida. Roy is a
2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Their debut collection, Catrachos, was published
by Graywolf Press in May of 2020. Website: www.roygguzman.com.

Danika Stegeman LeMay’s debut collection of poems, Pilot, is available now from Spork
Press. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and daughter. Danika received her MFA in
creative writing from George Mason University. Her website is danikastegemanlemay.com. 

Janna Knittel lives in Minnesota but still calls the Pacific Northwest “home.” Janna has published a chapbook, Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and has poems published or forthcoming in Blueline, Cottonwood, Up North Lit, North Dakota Quarterly, Split Rock Review, Cold Mountain Review, Whale Road Review, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology. Recognition includes a 2019 Artist’s Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Writing, broadcasting and children form the braid of Claudia Hampston Daly’s work and life.
From these strands she created important radio documentaries as an independent producer.
Her The Lives of the Children and For Kids’ Sake! Radio series earned more than fifty national
and international awards, including a Robert F. Kennedy Award, New York Festivals Gold
citations, and four Gabriels from UNDA USA.
Earlier Claudia served as Associate Director for Radio for the William Benton Broadcast Project
at the University of Chicago.Her work for Benton also won a number of major awards. She built
and managed six Minnesota Public Radio stations. She freelanced as a writer for print, radio,
television and film in the years her three sons were growing up. While still in her teens she
wrote and produced television commercials and special programming for the CBS affiliate in her
home town.
Lately she is occupied with the challenge of producing a coherent manuscript from years of
writing collected in computer files, thick binders, tiny notebooks and on random scraps of paper.
She vows to “get ‘er done” by the end of 2020. “Something good has to come out of this
horrendous year,” she says.

Richard Terrill is the author of What Falls Away Is Always: Poems & Conversations, as well as
five previous books including Coming Late to Rachmaninoff, winner of the Minnesota Book
Award for Poetry, and Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, winner of the Associated
Writing Programs Award for Nonfiction.  He has been awarded fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin and Minnesota State Arts Boards, the Jerome
Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as three
Fulbright Fellowships. Work has appeared in journals such as Iowa Review, Georgia
Review, North American Review, River Teeth, New Letters, Fourth Genre, and Crazyhorse.  He
is Professor Emeritus at Minnesota State, Mankato, where he was Distinguished Faculty
Scholar, and currently works as a jazz saxophone player.  He lives in Minneapolis.

The BRIDGES Reading series is intended to bring together writers across genres and cultural
backgrounds to express themselves, but also build links to each other. The title comes from a
performance piece, LANDBRIDGE: THE BERINGIA PROJECT, a performance piece co-written
and performed by Kusunoki and Jamison Mahto, an Anishinabe performance poet/trickster
coyote. “Starting with conflicting creation myths, we came to a point where we understood and
connected with the commonalities of our histories and cultures,” says Kusunoki. “It is the hope
of the series that readers and the audience will do the same.”