Third Friday Presents: Writing with Maps: A Brief History with Emily Barton Altman

Friday, July 19th at 7pm

Emily Barton Altman discussed Lake Michigan bathymetric map poetry for this month’s Third Friday Lecture. Altman read her work and then traced the map and score-based practices that informed her writing. Beginning with 20th century avant-garde practices and ending with contemporary work, Altman showed how writers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries used maps in their poetry to interrogate space, politics, and everyday life.

Emily Barton Altman is the author of two chapbooks, Bathymetry (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and Alice Hangs Her Map (dancing girl press, 2019). Recent poems appear in The Spectacle, Bone Bouquet, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver. In the fall she will begin teaching at Michigan State University.