Big Blue Marble is happy to host an evening with poets Valerie Wallace (author of "House of McQueen") and Grady Chambers (author of "North American Stadiums").

Valerie Wallace is also the author of the chapbook "The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping" (dancing girl press, 2011). Her work was chosen by Margaret Atwood for the 2012 Atty Award, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Award in Poetry. Her work has been supported by various grants and fellowships. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Associate Director, Communications for the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago and teaches at Harold Washington College, the Newberry Library, and offers private workshops. valeriewallace.net. Selected by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize, Valerie Wallace’s debut collection "House of McQueen" is a glittering debut by an assured new voice. Inhabiting the life and work of Alexander McQueen, Wallace builds a fantastical world using both original language and excerpts drawn from interviews, supermodels, Shakespeare, and more. At turns fierce and vulnerable, here is a collection that leaps from runway to fairytale to street with wild, brilliant grace.

Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed, 2018) selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and received his MFA from Syracuse University. Poems of his have recently appeared in Iowa Review Online; Nashville Review; Diode Poetry; Adroit Journal; Forklift, Ohio; and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.