Angela Shannon & Josie Raney

An evening of poetry with Angela Shannon and Josie Rainey.

Angela Shannon’s debut book bridges the real world of work, hardship and celebration, and the spirit world of ancestors, remembrance and faith. Shannon’s voice Is genuinely new. She possesses a gift for lyric poems of intimate intensity and a keen consciousness of the shared past. Her poems vividly imagine the thoughts and feelngs of black women.

The Guild Complex 2003 Poetry Fellow Josie Raney’s work is polished and deeply connected to the inner-most emotions of her characters. Raney graduated from Carleton College in 1994 and earned her MFA in poetry in 1999 from The University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. In 1999-2000, she lived in Budapest, Hungary, where as a Fulbright Scholar, she worked on a selection of contemporary Hungarian poetry translations. Her work most recently appeared in the journals “Five Points” and “Water-Stone”. This reading showcases the work she developed during her six month fellowship with the Guild Complex.