A Reading with Travis Lao and Stephen Kuusisto

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). [travisclau.com]

Stephen Kuusisto, who has been blind since birth, is an acclaimed poet who has written extensively about his experience of blindness, most recently in the bestselling Have Dog, Will Travel (Simon & Schuster, 2018) which Temple Grandin praised as “A perceptive and beautifully crafted memoir.” His most recent book of poetry is Letter to Borges (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Other books include his memoirs Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006) and Planet of the Blind (Dial Press, 1997), which was a New York Times Notable Book, and the poetry collection Only Bread, Only Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2000). He is currently working on a collection of prose poems for Copper Canyon Press entitled Mornings With Borges as well as a collection of political poems about disability. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Literature.