Steve Healey reads from "Safe Houses I Have Known," accompanied by Warren Woessner reading from "Exit-Sky"

As a child during the Cold War, Steve Healey learns that his father is a spy for the CIA. Beneath the banality of everyday life—the suburbs of Washington, DC; school and play; his parents’ deteriorating marriage—assumed names, parallel lives, and myriad Cold War menaces linger. Drawing from CIA training manuals and pop culture references alike, Healey’s poetry is both intimate and claustrophobic. In these poems, the natural anxiety of childhood is compounded by the weight of national and family secrets. Healey draws deep parallels between the shaky foundations of truth in his past and the paranoia that envelops our nation’s present.

Steve Healey is the author of two previous books of poetry, 10 Mississippi and Earthling, both from Coffee House Press. His poems have been published in magazines such as American Poetry Review, the Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and the Nation, and in anthologies, most recently The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at Minneapolis College.

Steve will be accompanied by Warren Woessner who is the Senior Editor of Abraxas, which he co-founded in 1968. He also was a co- founder of WORT-FM in Madison, WI. He has received Fellowships in Poetry from the NEA, the Wisconsin Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. Warren holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He co-founded Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner in 1993, where he works as a biotechnology patent attorney. Woessner's poetry has been widely published and anthologized, including in periodicals and reviews, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, the Nation, 5 AM, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly and The Beloit Pooetry Journal. He won the Minnesota Voices Competition sponsored by New Rivers Press in 1986. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His most recent work is 'Exit-Sky' from Holy Cow Press