Please join us for a double poetry book launch! Tiff Dressen and Alex Mattraw will read from their new collections, Of Mineral (Nightboat Books, spring ’22), and Raw Anyone (Cultural Society, fall ’22), with a third featured reader TBA. George Albon lauds Dressen’s “bold acts of accumulation and dispersal . . . [as] . . . hybrids and synergies and possibly even ‘a new structure for love.’ . . .” Albon writes: “. . . these texts are stays . . . to maintain the exquisite tensions of a lifeworld in which ‘we are all responders.’” Of Mattraw’s Raw Anyone, Jenny Boully finds a space “Infused with dreams, imaginative readings, leaps of language . . . [revealing] the hidden within our plain sight.” Boully writes: “These are poems that illuminate through their withholding, trip the wire of time, and fill the hush of silence.”

Alex Mattraw is a Berkeley poet and educator. She is the author of Raw Anyone (2022), We fell into weather (2020), and small siren (2018), all with Brooklyn’s Cultural Society. You can also find the latest of her four chapbooks at Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in Jacket2, Lana Turner, Tupelo Quarterly, VOLT, and elsewhere. A frequent collaborator with other writers and artists, Alex is also the founder and curator of the Bay Area reading, art, and performance series, Lone Glen, which just celebrated a decade of community. http://alexandramattraw.com

Tiff Dressen was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Their latest book is Of Mineral (Nightboat Books, 2022). SONGS FROM THE ASTRAL BESTIARY (lyric& Press, 2014) is their first full-length collection of poetry. They currently live in Oakland and work in the Office of Research at UC Berkeley. They enjoy urban flâneuring, their felines, stained glass work, setting type and printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book.