Silo City Reading Series: Mary Ruefle, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, William Tyler, Julia Dzwonkoski

Featured Artists

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  Mary Ruefle Poet
  

  Mary Ruefle

  Poet

  Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including The Book (Wave Books, 2023), Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she served as the state’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2024.

  Photo Credit: Libby Lewis

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  Julia Dzwonkoski Artist
  

  Julia Dzwonkoski

  Artist

  Julia Dzwonkoski’s drawings often take the form of existential cartoons. She studied art at SUNY Buffalo and UC San Diego. Her work has been shown at Rivalry Projects (Buffalo), Gattopardo (LA), Harkawik (NY) and Blank Forms (NY) and is collected in the books Two Eyes in an Environment (2023) and 100 More Frogs (2025). Dzwonkoski is currently working on a new series of pictures inspired by the poet and collagist Helen Adam. She lives in Buffalo.

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  William Tyler Guitarist
  

  William Tyler

  Guitarist

  William Tyler has spent the last two decades reshaping the landscape of American instrumental guitar. After establishing his voice through essential tenures in Silver Jews and Lambchop, the Nashville native launched a solo career defined by a restless curiosity. His work bridges the gap between country-rearing melodies and postmodern experimentation—blending the spirit of Chet Atkins with the avant-garde textures of Gavin Bryars and electroacoustic abstraction.

  His latest album, Time Indefinite, marks his first solo effort in five years. Born from the isolation of the pandemic and recorded between Nashville and Los Angeles, the album is a candid, “uneasy, damaged, and honest” exploration of mental health and survival. Collaborating with figures like Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden and producer Jake Davis, Tyler embraces the “hiss and wobble” of antique tape loops and field recordings to anchor his compositions.

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  Sasha Debevec-McKenney Poet
  

  Sasha Debevec-McKenney

  Poet

  Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the author of the poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She received her MFA from New York University. She was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in places like The New Yorker, The Yale Review, , The Drift, and Granta. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University.