kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Ariel Gordon -- THIN AIR Afternoon Book Chat
Friday Sep 24 2010 2:30 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium

The Afternoon Book Chats are the perfect excuse for a coffee break! The Atrium at McNally Robinson Booksellers takes on a café ambiance for this series of relaxed conversations about writing moderated by THIN AIR’s own Charlene Diehl. From irreverent games to delicately rendered impressions, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Ariel Gordon show the power and play in poetry.

kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s visual poetry has appeared in the anthology Boredom Fighters and in such magazines as dandelion and filling Station. A winner of the Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook Award, he studied English literature at the University of Calgary. Rhapsodomancy, his first full-length poetry collection, was recently published by Coach House. It dives into two notation systems, Shorthand and Unifon, in order to explore the crossed lines between visual language and voice. eckhoff recently traded his life for a house in Armstrong, British Columbia, and a job teaching literature at Okanagan College.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. She has two chapbooks to her credit, The Navel Gaze and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999, and this spring, Palimpsest Press published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. Gordon coordinates literary events at Aqua Books and for several years has been the driving force behind the THIN AIR’s Hot Air blog. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer. When not being bookish, she chases her young daughter or tromps through the woods photographing mushrooms.