Jeff Alessandrelli and Hajara Quinn are two Portland-based poets who came through Spokane on their way to the Montana Book Festival earlier this month. They stopped in to the SPR studio to talk with Chris Maccini about their new books and their Montana Book Festival panel titled "Is This Surreal or For Real?"
Harper Quinn is the author of Coolth (Big Lucks Books, 2018). She received her MFA from Cornell University in 2014, and her work has been supported by Literary Arts and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Poems can be found in Gramma Daily, Gulf Coast, The Volta and Sixth Finch. She lives in Portland, OR where she works as the Program Director at the Independent Publishing Resource Center.
Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of the full-length poetry collections This Last Time Will Be The First (2014) and Fur Not Light (2019), both from Burnside Review Press. He’s additionally the author of a short poetic biography of the French avant-garde composer Erik Satie entitled Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press; 2011), a short essay collection focusing on skateboarding and The Notorious B.I.G. entitled The Man on High—Essays On Skateboarding, Hip-Hop, Poetry and The Notorious B.I.G. (Eyewear (U.K); 2018) and five chapbooks. Recent work by him appears in Poetry Northwest, The American Poetry Review, and The Hong Kong Review of Books. In addition to his own writing, Jeff also runs the vinyl-record literary label Fonograf Editions. He lives in Portland, OR.