Pleasure Principle

Please visit Clio's on Tuesday, June 4th at 6pm for cocktails and a reading to celebrate Madeleine Cravens' debut collection of poems, Pleasure Principle. Madeleine will be joined by poets Ryann Stevenson, Sarah Ghazal Ali, and aracelis girmay.

Madeleine Cravens was a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her poems can be found in The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the Sewanee Writers Conference. She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Oakland. Pleasure Principle is her debut collection.

Ryann Stevenson's first book, Human Resources, was selected by Henri Cole for the 2021 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and is published by Milkweed Editions. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, and Kenyon Review, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet and editor. She is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ "Poem-A-Day" series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.

aracelis girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently the black maria (BOA, 2016). girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the current Editor-at-Large for BOA’s Blessing the Boats Selections. For the past few years she collaborated, as editor, on the anthology SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).