Typically hosted in written format here at Entropy, Dinnerview is a food-focused interview series featuring contemporary poets, writers, editors, and other literary figures. The series asks writers about favorite meals, food quirks, and really, what sustains them through the sometimes-difficult act of writing. Curator Danielle Susi was invited by the Utah Arts Festival to host a series of four live, virtual Dinnerviews with Utah writers and poets. Below, you will find the recordings of those live interviews.
Lisa Bickmore is a poet, video artist, scholar and artist of the book, and teacher. She is the author of three books of poems: Haste (Signature Books, 1994), flicker, which won the 2014 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press, and Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press, June 2017). She teaches writing at Salt Lake Community College and is the founder of Lightscatter Press. She lives with her husband in West Jordan.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pant; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her latest nonfiction work, The Broken Country, won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize. Her newest collection of poetry is Nightingale. Her work has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship Trust and various state arts councils. Her poetry has been included in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry series, and she was guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020. She currently teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s poet laureate.
Ashley Farmer is the author of a chapbook and three books, most recently The Women (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Her work has been published in places like Gay Magazine, TriQuarterly, The Progressive, Santa Monica Review, Buzzfeed, Flaunt, Nerve, Gigantic, Salt Hill Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Best American Essays notable distinction, the 2018 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2017 Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award, and fellowships from Syracuse University and the Baltic Writing Residency. Ashley lives in Salt Lake City, UT.
Katharine Coles has published seven collections of poems, most recently Wayward (Red Hen Press, 2019). Her memoir, Look Both Ways, was released in 2018 by Turtle Point Press, which will also publish The Stranger I Become: essays in reckless poetics in fall 2020, and Solve for X, a collection of poems, in 2022. A Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, she has received awards from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Since she enjoys eating far more than cooking, these days without restaurants have been especially hard for her, especially with all her friends showing off their baking skills on social media.