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Come celebrate National Poetry Month during first annual Kentucky Poetry Month, sponsored by the University of Kentucky's MFA in Creative Writing!

2015 Kentucky Poetry Festival Events

April 24 - May 01

• Off the Ground Featuring Bianca Lynne Spriggs

  • Common Grounds on High Street

  • Friday April 24, 2015

  • 7:30pm

  • Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Bianca Lynne Spriggs is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. She is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), and the forthcoming titles, Call Her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press, 2016), The Galaxy is a Dance Floor (Argos Books, 2016), and Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women (Accents Publishing, 2015). Her work may be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Open mic to follow!
     

• KFP College Showcase

  • James F. Hardymon Theater, inside the Davis Marksbury Building on the UK's campus, 329 Rose Street

  • Saturday April 25, 2015

  • 2:00pm

  • Creative writing college students from around Kentucky will read their poetry.

• A Reading by Louisvillian Poets, feat. Jeremy Clark, Adam Day, Lynnell Edwards, Michael Estes, and Martha Greenwald

  • James F. Hardymon Theater, inside the Davis Marksbury Building on the UK's campus, 329 Rose Street

  • Saturday April 25, 2015

  • 7:00pm

  • Louisville Poets will read their work.

• Verse in Type

  • Clark Art & Antique, 801 Winchester Rd, Lexington, KY 40505

  • Sunday April 26th

  • 3:00pm

  • Broadside display from the King Library Press.

• UK Libraries King Library Spring Seminar

  • Boone Center

  • Tuesday April 28th

  • 7:00pm

  • Dara Wier and Emily Pettit will lecture for the King Library as Keynote Speakers. King Library Press Broadside Contest Award winner will read.
     

• Waxing Gastronomic: Food Poetry Open Mic

  • Donut Days on Southland

  • Wednesday April 29

  • 4:00pm

• Dara Wier & Emily Pettit, Visiting Writers Series

  • UK Art Museum

  • Wednesday April 29th

  • 7:00pm

  • Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (2009); Remnants of Hannah (2006); Reverse Rapture (2005), and many others. She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars and directs the M.F.A. program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

  • Emily Pettit is the author of Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC), and two chapbooks How (Octopus Books) and What Happened to Limbo (Pilot Books). Her poems can be found in Skein, Thethe, Sixth Finch, Wolf in a Field, Le Petite Zine, Forklift Ohio, Glitterpony, Diagram, Octopus, H_ngM_n and elsewhere.  She has a MFA from the University of Iowa where she was a Maytag Fellow. She teaches writing and literature at Elms College, poetry workshops at Flying Object and is publisher and editor of jubilat (the literary magazine) and at factory hollow press.She is an editor for notnostrums (notnostrums.com) and Factory Hollow Press. More poems can be found online (Octopus, Sixth Finch, Strange Machine) and in print (Invisible Ear, and, soon, Skein and SUPERMACHINE.)

• Holler, featuring Normandi Ellis, Roger Bonair-Agard, AlexanderSings

  • Al’s Bar

  • Wednesday April, 29, 2015

  • 8:00 PM

  • Open mic starts at 8:00pm

  • We celebrate national poetry month with the return of Normandi Ellis, author of Words on Water, and the debut of two-time National Poetry Slam Champion, Roger Bonair-Agard, his latest Bury My Clothes, a long list finalist for the National Book Award. Providing music is Louisville based old time/folk artist AlexanderSings! Alejandro Udisco Kentucki). As usual open mic opens and closes the show. Bring some extra bones for the Holler bucket. Support your local arts. See y'all there!
     

• Write or Die Poetry Slam (Presented by Bianca Spriggs/Hosted by the Raven House)

  • Ravenhouse 3229 Raven Cir, Lexington, Kentucky

  • Thursday April 30, 2015

  • 8:30pm, doors open at 8:00pm

  • Eight poets from around the state and region will compete in a three-round elimination spoken word competition for a first prize of $500 (sponsored by The Morris Book Shop) and a second prize of $300 (Sponsored by UnderMain). The feature and celebrity judge for the night is award-winning poet, Roger Bonair-Agard. Opening musical performances by Designer Flow and J. Cannon. DJ Warren Peace will be on the one's and two's. And special bonus, Thomas Kirkland, veteran slam emcee, will be dusting off his mic for the occasion! There will be a full spread, BYOB. Admission is $20. Capacity is 80 attendees, so get there early for this fast-paced, one-of-a-kind event! You can purchase tix in advance here: http://theravenhouse.brownpapertickets.com. A portion of the proceeds will go towards each of the performers that night as well as the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning!

• Roger Bonair-Agard Interview

  • William T. Young Auditorium

  • Thursday April 30th, 2015

  • 5:30pm

  • Poet and spoken-word artist Roger Bonair-Agard was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the United States in 1987. His collections of poetry include Tarnish and Masquerade (2006); Gully (2010); and Bury My Clothes (2013), which was a long-list finalist for a National Book Award. A Cave Canem fellow, Bonair-Agard performs his work and leads workshops internationally. He is the cofounder and artistic director of the louderARTS Project and teaches poetry at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Facility in Chicago.
     

• Ekphrastic Poetry Prize DEADLINE

• The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky and the University of Kentucky MFA Program in Creative Writing present The Kentucky Poetry Festival’s Ekphrastic Poetry Prize. First prize: $100. Deadline: May 01st. Entries must pertain to the permanent collection, or a current or past exhibit at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. Please indicate the name of the work and the artist’s name with entry. Contest is open to all poets, excluding current MFA poetry students at the University of Kentucky. Entrants may submit up to 3 poems as a single attached file with the format firstname_lastname2015 to: kpfpoetrycontest@gmail.com. For inquiries contact us at kpfpoetrycontest@gmail.com

• Poetry in the Greenhouses

  • Michler's Florist, Greenhouses & Garden Design, 417 E Maxwell St, Lexington, KY 40508

  • Friday, May 01

  • 5:30pm

  • Readings by Steven Alvarez, Dan Howell, Leatha Kendrick, George Ella Lyon, Maurice Manning, Christopher McCurry, Kimberly Miller, Gurney Norman, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Richard Taylor, and Jeff Worley
  • Open mic to follow.

***THIS EVENT IS CANCELLED DUE TO DANGEROUS WEATHER CONDITIONS. WE WILL RESCHEDULE AND POST UPDATES WHEN PLANS ARE FINALIZED*** The University of Kentucky Graduate Appalachian Research Community presents the 6th Annual UK Appalachian Research Community Symposium and Arts Showcase on Saturday, March 7, 2015 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the William T. Young Library.  This year's keynote speaker is Lisa Conley, Ph.D. Her research interests focus on foodways, environmental sustainability, and local food politics in motivating the self-provisioning practices of people in rural and urban Kentucky.  Please, find more information about registration or proposal submition here: https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/annual-research-symposium.  The deadline to submit abstracts is February 15, 2015.  Registration for presenters and non-presenters is free.  Undergraduate and Graduate students are welcome to register.

The National Conference on Undergraduate Research is an annual student conference dedicated to promoting undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity in all fields of study. Unlike meetings of academic professional organizations, this gathering of young scholars welcomes presenters from institutions of higher learning from all corners of the academic curriculum. This annual conference creates a unique environment for the celebration and promotion of undergraduate student achievement, provides models of exemplary research and scholarship, and helps to improve the state of undergraduate education.

Learn more here.

Title:  Sub-Exponential Decay Estimates on Trace Norms of Localized Functions of Schrodinger Operators

Abstract:  In 1973, Combes and Thomas discovered a general technique for showing exponential decay of eigenfunctions. The technique involved proving the exponential decay of the resolvent of the Schrodinger operator localized between two distant regions. Since then, the technique has been applied to several types of Schrodinger operators. Recent work has also shown the Combes–Thomas method works well with trace class and Hilbert–Schmidt type operators. In this talk, we build on those results by applying the Combes–Thomas method in the trace, Hilbert–Schmidt, and other trace-type norms to prove sub-exponential decay estimates on functions of Schrodinger operators localized between two distant regions.

Title:  On the ground state of the magnetic Laplacian in corner domains

Abstract:  I will present recent results about the first eigenvalue of the magnetic Laplacian in general 3D-corner domains with Neumann boundary condition in the semi-classical limit.  The use of singular chains show that the asymptotics of the first eigenvalue is governed by a hierarchy of model problems on the tangent cones of the domain. We provide estimations of the remainder depending on the geometry and the variations of the magnetic field. This is a joint work with V. Bonnaillie-Nol and M. Dauge.

Title: Informatics and Modeling Platform for Stable Isotope-Resolve Metabolomics

Abstract: Recent advances in stable isotope-resolved metabolomics (SIRM) are enabling orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of observable metabolic traits (a metabolic phenotype) for a given organism or community of organisms.  Analytical experiments that take only a few minutes to perform can detect stable isotope-labeled variants of thousands of metabolites.  Thus, unique metabolic phenotypes may be observable for almost all significant biological states, biological processes, and perturbations.  Currently, the major bottleneck is the lack of data analysis that can properly organize and interpret this mountain of phenotypic data as highly insightful biochemical and biological information for a wide range of biological research applications.  To address this limitation, we are developing bioinformatic, biostatistical, and systems biochemical tools, implemented in an integrated data analysis platform, that will directly model metabolic networks as complex inverse problems that are optimized and verified by experimental metabolomics data.  This integrated data analysis platform will enable a broad application of SIRM from the discovery of specific metabolic phenotypes representing biological states of interest to a mechanism-based understanding of a wide range of biological processes with particular metabolic phenotypes.

Title:  Smoothness of isometries between subRiemannian manifolds

Abstract:  In a joint work with Enrico Le Donne (Jyvaskyla, Finland), we show that the group of isometries (i.e., distance-preserving homeomorphisms) of an equiregular subRiemannian manifold is a finite-dimensional Lie group of smooth transformations. The proof is based on a new PDE argument, in the spirit of harmonic coordinates, establishing that in an arbitrary subRiemannian manifold there exists an open dense subset where all isometries are smooth.