FSC Virtual STEM Poetry Series Welcomes Neil Aitken & Jenny Qi!

66 views Nov 4, 2022
Previously recorded on November 29, 2022. For all of our upcoming readings, please visit www.farmingdal....
Thank you for joining us for the second Virtual STEM Poetry Reading Series at Farmingdale State College. Funded by a 2022 Students First Grant, this virtual, this series has two primary goals: first, to expose the FSC community to the work of poets writing about and/or working within STEM; and and second, to enhance the FSC community's engagement with STEM majors at FSC through conversation with authors about the synergistic relationship between STEM and poetry.
Let's meet tonight's readers!
Neil Aitken is the author of two books of poetry, Babbage’s Dream (Sundress Publications, 2017), a semi-finalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize, and The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga Press, 2008), winner of the Philip Levine Prize. A former computer games programmer with an undergraduate degree in computer science, Neil left the programming field in 2004 to pursue creative writing and teaching. He holds both a multi-genre MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and his own poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hyphen Magazine, Ninth Letter, and have also been anthologized, set to music, and used for voiceover narration in an animated short. In addition to writing poetry, he also works on literary translations of contemporary Chinese poetry and writes interactive fiction games in Twine. A past Kundiman Poetry Fellow, he also has served as the Virtual Writer-in-Residence for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and as Writer-in-Residence for the Regina Public Library. He presently lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada where he works as an online creative writing coach and manuscript editor. Visit him online at www.neil-aitken.com.
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, the Brown Handler Residency, and the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology.