ROOM 220 presents Cassie Pruyn and Benjamin Aleshire

ROOM 220 hosts the book launch for Cassie Pruyn’s Lena at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 11, at Saturn Bar (3067 St. Claude Avenue). Lena is the winner of the 2017 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. 

Cassie Pruyn is a New Orleans-based poet born and raised in Portland, Maine. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, The Normal School, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, Salt Hill Journal, and others. She is the author of a forthcoming narrative history of New Orleans’ Bayou St. John, and of Lena (Texas Tech University Press), winner of the 2017 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry.

Benjamin Aleshire composes poems for strangers in the street on a manual typewriter. His writing is forthcoming in Iowa Review and Boston Review. He works for Green Mountains Review, and will be in residence this summer at the Künstlerhaus Vorwerk-Stift in Hamburg. Find him at www.poetforhire.org, or on the corner of Royal & St. Peter.