.
Update: Some photos from 2011 Boogfest are at Ian’s Flickr: here.
IW: Ian will be reading on Sun. Aug. 7, at 12:20 p.m. for 10 minutes at Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
Hi,
One month from now, from Fri., Aug. 5 through Tues. Aug. 9, we’ll be celebrating Boog’s 20th anniversary by putting on the fifth annual Welcome to Boog City poetry and music festival. It will feature 67 poets, 10 musical acts, and 8 plays over the five days.
The poetry readings are curated by Jim Behrle, Joanna Fuhrman, and me. The music is booked by Brian Speaker. Thanks to Jim, Joanna, and Brian for helping make this festival happen.
Among the festival highlights are:
—our d.a. levy lives series devotes a night to Black Radish Books;
—our 8th annual small, small press fair, with exhibits from a host of small presses, and readings by their authors;—Poetry’s First Responders: 9/11, A Time When Poetry was Always Still Possible a panel curated and moderated by Douglas Rothschild;
—poet Rebecca Wolff reading and in conversation with poet Alan Gilbert.
—and our Second Poets’ Theater night, featuring eight plays.
The full schedule for the event is below this note, followed by performer bios and websites.If you need any additional information you can reach me at 212-842-BOOG (2664) or editor@boogcity.com.
as ever,
David
———-
5th Annual
Welcome to Boog City festival
5 Days of Poetry and Music
FRIDAY AUGUST 5, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café
94 Avenue A.
NYC
Free with a two-drink minimum
Readings and musical performances by
7:00 p.m.-Rachel Aydt
7:10 p.m.-Jeffrey Wright
7:20 p.m.-Alex Abelson
7:30 p.m.-Alan Gilbert
7:40 p.m.-Joy Katz
7:55 p.m.-Basil King
8:05 p.m.-Crabs on Banjo (music)
8:55 p.m.-Jill Stengel
9:10 p.m.-Rebecca Wolff, reading and in conversation with Alan Gilbert
10:00 p.m.-Sean Cole
10:10 p.m.-Dan Fishback (music)
10:40 p.m.-Crazy and the Brains (music)
11:30 p.m.-Greg Smith and the Broken English (music)
Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave.
Venue is at East 6th Street
Venue is at East 6th Street
SATURDAY AUGUST 6,
11:30 A.M.-9:00 P.M.
11:30 A.M.-9:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn
Free
8th Annual Small, Small Press Fair
Beginning with readings from authors of the exhibiting presses
12:00 p.m. Evie Shockley, Belladonna
12:10 p.m. Leigh Stein, Bone Bouquet
12:20 p.m. Cariah Lily Rosberg, Don’s Saddles and East Egg Press
12:30 p.m. Magus Magnus, Furniture Press
12:40 p.m. Helen Vitoria, Gigantic Sequins
12:50 p.m. Brenda Iijima, Least Weasel Chapbooks @ Propolis Press
1:00 p.m. Stephanie Gray, Litmus Press/Aufgabe
1:10 p.m. Joe Elliot, Lunar Chandelier
1:20 p.m. Ronna Lebo, Off the Park Press
1:30 p.m. Damian Weber (music)
1:50 p.m. Break
2:00 p.m. J. Hope Stein, Ping Pong
2:10 p.m. Tantra-zawadi, Poets Wear Prada
2:20 p.m. Lydia Cortes, Straw Gate Books
2:25 p.m. Dorothy Friedman August, White Rabbit zine
2:30 p.m. Emily Skillings, Stonecutter Journal
2:40 p.m. Lawrence Giffin, Tea Party Republicans Press
2:50 p.m. Ron Horning, Vanitas magazine and Libellum Books
3:00 p.m. Break
—————–
3:10 p.m. Rebecca Satellite (music)
3:40 p.m. Paul Foster Johnson
3:50 p.m. Austin LaGrone
4:00 p.m. Toni Simon
4:10 p.m. Will Edmiston
4:20 p.m. Kimberly Lyons
4:30 p.m. Christine Hamm
4:40 p.m. Vyt Bakaitis
4:50 p.m. Martha King
5:00 p.m. Debrah Morkun
5:15 p.m. John Mulrooney
5:30 p.m. Justin Remer (music)
6:00 p.m. Break
6:10 p.m. Joanna Penn Cooper
6:20 p.m. Franklin Bruno
6:30 p.m. Tanya Larkin
6:45 p.m. Emily Einhorn (music)
7:15 p.m. Mary Austin Speaker
7:25 p.m. Jean-Paul Pecqueur
7:35 p.m. Jesse Seldess
7:45 p.m. Douglas Piccininni
Directions: 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza,
C to Clinton-Washington avenues, Q to 7th Ave.
Venue is bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave.
SUNDAY AUGUST 7,
12:00 P.M.-4:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn
Free
12:00 p.m. Mark Lamoureux
12:10 p.m. Nicole Wallace
12:20 p.m. Ian Wilder
12:30 p.m. Douglas Rothschild
12:45 p.m. Charles Mansfield (music)
1:15 p.m. Brett Price
1:25 p.m. Meredith Walters
1:35 p.m. Kimberly Ann Southwick
1:50 p.m. Andrea Ascah-Robinson
2:05 p.m. Greg Fuchs
2:15 p.m.-break
2:25 p.m. The Death of Irony; The Triviality of Poetry
in the Face of Such Tragedy; and Other
Myths of 9/11; a Retrospective
The Death of Irony; The Triviality of Poetry in the Face of Such Tragedy; and Other Myths of 9/11; a Retrospective Immediately after 9/11, media pundits and assorted politicos unilaterally declared “Irony is Dead.” But the spray-painted sign at the first responder’s entrance to Ground Zero, which very cryptically read “Payback is a bitch,” belied this assertion. A number of poets who felt that irony was perhaps still alive will look back and consider the value and purposes of poetry.
Curated and hosted by Douglas Rothschild, with panelists Jim Behrle, Joe Elliot, and more.
Directions: 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza,
C to Clinton-Washington avenues, Q to 7th Ave.
Venue is bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave.
SUNDAY AUGUST 7,
5:45 P.M.
Zinc Bar
82 W. 3rd St.
NYC
Boog Poets’ Theater, featuring:
Austin Alexis’ A Favor
Charles Borkhuis’ Flipper
Maria Brandt’s The Root People
Joel Chace’s The Cell
Jennifer Hill’s Three Turns
Vincent Katz’s Veranda of the Grand Gables (excerpt)
Eugenia Macer-Story’s, Captain Midnight’s Spyglass Heart
Matt Reeck’s Panoptical Illusion:
Directions: A/B/C/D/E/F/V to W. 4th St.
Venue is bet. Sullivan and Thompson sts.
MON. AUG. 8,
6:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn
free
6:00 p.m. Sheila Maldonado
6:10 p.m. Mark Statman
6:20 p.m. Cara Benson
6:30 p.m. Ekoko Omadeke
6:40 p.m. Kathrin Schaeppi
6:55 p.m. Michael Leong
7:05 p.m. Joe Crow Ryan (music)
7:25 p.m. break
7:35 p.m. Monica Hand
7:45 p.m. Greg Purcell
8:00 p.m. Claire Donato
8:10 p.m. Jibade-Khalil Huffman-Bday is next day
8:20 p.m. Ish Klein
8:35 p.m. Joe Crow Ryan (music)
Directions: 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza,
C to Clinton-Washington avenues, Q to 7th Ave.
Venue is bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave.
TUES. AUG. 9,
6:00 P.M.
ACA Galleries
529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC
d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press, season 9 kick-off
Black Radish Books
featuring readings from:
Bruce Covey
Carrie Hunter
Mark Lamoureux
Marci Nelligan
Marthe Reed
Kathrin Schaeppi
Jill Stengel
David Wolach
and music from
Cat Rockefeller
Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues
—————
**Welcome to Boog City 5 Bios and Websites**
**Welcome to Boog City 5 Bios and Websites**
*Friday
**Alex Abelson
Alex Abelson is a video artist and poet working out of Brooklyn. He is an M.F.A. candidate at The Pratt Institute.
**Rachel Aydt
Rachel Aydt is a writer and assistant professor at The New School University, where she teaches magazine journalism. She’s worked on staff at magazines for nearly two decades, including American Heritage, Cosmopolitan, and CosmoGirl. Now she works from home (or from any cafe that has electrical sockets and bottomless cups of coffee), and she’s a regular contributor of essays and features to The New York Times’ Motherlode blog, Parents magazine, Time International, and Inked. She blogs at New York Lost and Found with a large focus on New York City, the arts, travel, and parenting. She’s a cofounder of a developing creativity blog called Word City Studio, which uses New York City as a backdrop.
•
When I was 18 years old I was reading poetry at an open mic night at the QE2 on Central Avenue in Albany. That year, I was getting my B.A. from SUNY Albany, but what I was mostly doing was swinging 300 burritos on a busy night at El Loco Mexican Cafe. Or hanging out at Justin’s on a flush night; Palais Royale on not such a flush night. Come to think of it, this seems like a time when drinks were rarely bought; they were just doled out and fueling general mayhem up and down Lark Street.
In the audience at the QE2 were two stand-up young men named Rod Sperry and David Kirschenbaum. They liked my poetry a lot, they said. They were starting a press—what would become Boog Literature—and they wanted to publish a chapbook of my work. I wanted to date Rod, and so I said yes. That’s not why I said yes, but the synergy of the xeroxing of stapled chapbook days certainly helped to fuel a crush, and David and Rod have remained stalwart friends and supporters for the last 20-plus years. My chapbook was titled A Canopy Sack of Details. I write mainly nonfiction narratives now. I’d love to believe that not-so-buried in each of these are bits of poetry emerging; it’s a calling that seems to transform and reemerge at the most unexpected times and for the strangest reasons.
Sean Cole is a public radio reporter and poet living in New York, hailing from Boston, and formerly of Toronto. He’s proud to be a long-standing member of the Boog family, beginning with his first chapbook, “By the Author,” which came out so long ago he’s forgotten the year.
•
Who is this bouyant, Ted-Berrigan-sized, yarmulked guy at Aaron Kiely’s Boston Alternative Poetry Conference in 1998? I mean the one behaving (maybe overly so?) as though anything’s possible. I mean the guy who sat on the publishing panel, with a bone folder and long-armed stapler, assembling chapbooks before our eyes—chapbooks for which he’d gathered the poems one day prior. When you meet someone who will be your friend and collaborator for life, there’s a hair of a second when you know it. You don’t know, necessarily, he’ll be the first person to mass-produce your poems. Nor that he’ll one day send you 31 self-addressed stamped postcards and demand a month of daily poems because he thinks you’re not writing enough (because you aren’t). Nor that you will fight, for days, about whether it’s unseemly to name a Boog Literature volume Erections. I mean when you first lay eyes on him, you don’t even know his name. But there’s an instant when, inexplicably, you’re already grateful for his unaccountable belief in you, for his tirelessly shepherding so many nutso poets into print, for driving around New York delivering hundreds of free Boog City issues to bars and cafés. There’s just a moment when you flash on that. And then it passes. And he sticks out his hand and says, “Hi! I’m David Kirschenbaum.”
**Crabs on Banjo
Crabs on Banjo is an experimental, improvisational musical act combining audience-inspired titles with the wit and melodic force of Ben Krieger and Brian Speaker. Rarely will you find a more potent combination of class and crass.
**Crazy and the Brains
Punk Rock meets the Stone Age, Crazy and the Brains will have you singing, dancing, and fist pumping to catchy grooves and fun lyrics. They really do just “Wanna Be On Saturday Night Live,” and with great hooks, it wouldn’t surprise me if they eventually were. Downstroke guitars and xylophone makes them sound like The Ramones meet The Violent Femmes.
•
The self-described “newest band in NYC” is a modern-day Ramones, with lyrics so dumb they have to be smart (or so one hopes). “I don’t want to do anything I don’t like. I just wanna be on Saturday Night Live,” they artlessly state on a track from their self-titled EP, with no evident irony and more energy than any amount of Ritalin could control. You can see the live video at Youtube, along with loads of other clips that showcase their sound.
The band’s not-so-secret weapon is Jeff Rubin, the nominal Brains of the outfit, who serves as lead xylophone player and a contrasting voice of sanity. It’s his excellent and unexpected chops with mallets that form the backbone over which Crazy Chris Urban’s absurd stories get sung.
Having released two EPs in association with Crafty Records, the core duo has expanded into a full band with a punk rock rhythm section. Whatever arrangements Crazy and the Brains provide, it’s the original duo that garners the lion’s share of attention—and rightfully. It’s the combination of Urban’s understated madness and Rubin’s virtuosic skill that fills the seats. Brian Speaker, The New York Antifolk Festival’s musical curator, simply states that “Crazy and the Brains kick ass!”
Primitive and impossibly danceable, Crazy and the Brains are best taken late at night, with little planning and a fair amount of alcohol. —Jonathan Berger
**Dan Fishback
Dan Fishback has been writing and performing in New York City since 2003, in the anti-folk and experimental performance scenes. His plays and performances have been staged at venues like P.S. 122, Dixon Place, Joe’s Pub, and BAX, among others. His band Cheese On Bread has toured Europe and North America, and has released records in the United States and Japan. As a solo artist, Fishback has released several recordings, including Sweet Chastity and Calendar Boys, with Mammal forthcoming. In the past, he fronted the grunge band The Faggots, played drums in Old Hat, and danced in Nan Turner’s movement troupe Underthrust. Fishback has enjoyed artist residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Dixon Place. He received the Franklin Furnace Fund grant for performance art in 2010 and the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists in 2007.
**Alan Gilbert
Alan Gilbert is the author of the poetry book Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem books) and a collection of essays and articles entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press). His poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and The Nation, among other places. His writings on poetry and art have appeared in a variety of publications, including Aperture, Artforum, The Believer, Cabinet, Modern Painters, Parkett, and The Village Voice.
**Greg Smith and the Broken English
Hailing from the sleepy mountain towns of western Massachusetts, Greg Smith spent his formative years engrossed in the music of bands like Nirvana, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. It wasn’t until discovering the music of the now late Dave Carter that Smith found a deep appreciation for folk and country music and realized his calling as a songwriter. Leaving behind country life for the big city, Smith has struggled to find better times on what’s been a bumpy road of jobs that don’t pay, long-distance relationships, and the burden of leaving behind the family farm. But through the hard times, he’s channeled his experiences into a body of work that breaks down stylistic barriers and simply tells it like it is.
**Joy Katz
Joy Katz is the author of two poetry collections, The Garden Room and Fabulae, and co-editor of the acclaimed anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems.
She was educated at The Ohio State University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Stanford University. Trained in industrial design, she worked as a graphic designer before starting to write poetry.
Honors for her writing include a 2011 NEA fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Her poems are anthologized in The Best American Poetry, among other places, and appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The Village Voice.
She has taught literature and poetry at The New School and NYU and now teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and in the low-residency and on-the-ground programs at Chatham University. She is an editor-at-large for Pleiades.
She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and young son.
**Basil King
Basil King is a painter/poet. Born in England before World War II, he has lived in Brooklyn since 1968. He attended Black Mountain College as a teenager, and for the past four decades he has taken his art “from the abstract to the figure, from the figure to the abstract.”
He began to write in 1985, after his first trip back to England, and he now practices both arts daily. His books include mirage: a poem in 22 sections, Warp Spasm, Identity, and 77 Beasts/Basil King’s Beastiary.
Learning to Draw/A History, a collection of 22 sections of this ongoing work, is forthcoming in the fall of 2011 from Skylight Press. He most recently exhibited his art at Poets House, New York City, in 2010.
**Jill Stengel
Formerly of San Francisco and Los Angeles, poet and publisher Jill Stengel lives in Davis, Calif. where she writes, publishes intermittently her a+bend press, and raises three children. Five of her nine chapbooks can be viewed online at Dusie’s site, and she has other work online as well. Black Radish Books will publish her first full-length collection, dear jack, later this year.
**Rebecca Wolff
Rebecca Wolff is the author of three books of poems, including most recently The King (W. W. Norton). She is working on a fourth, called One Morning–. Her novel The Beginners is out this summer from Riverhead Books. Wolff is the editor of Fence and Fence Books and the publisher of The Constant Critic.
**Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is the author of 11 books of verse including Employment of the Apes, All in All, Drowning Light, and Walking on Words. His poetry has also been in numerous magazines and several anthologies. His artwork has been in a dozen group shows and one solo show. He can be found reading, singing, and wise-cracking on Youtube. Critical work appears monthly in The Brooklyn Rail.
*Saturday
**Dorothy Friedman August, White Rabbit zine
**Vyt Bakaitis
Vyt Bakaitis has a new book of poems, Deliberate Proof (Lunar Chandelier Press), and has also published translations of poetry from several languages, with his versions of the classic Romantics Hölderlin and Mickiewicz included in World Poetry (W. W. Norton). Daybooks 1970-1972 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), his translations from the Lithuanian poet Jonas Mekas, appeared in 2003. City Country was his first book (Black Thistle Press).
**Franklin Bruno
Franklin Bruno’s first full-length collection, The Accordion
Repertoire, is forthcoming from Edge Books next year. His previous chapbooks are Policy Instrument (Lame House Press) and MF/MA (Seeing Eye Books). He is also the author of a critical book on Elvis Costello’s album Armed Forces in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series; his music criticism appears in many publications. Since 1990, he has released over a dozen albums of original songs as a solo artist and member of Nothing Painted Blue and The Human Hearts, his current band. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens.
**Joanna Penn Cooper
Dancing Girl Press published Joanna Penn Cooper’s second chapbook of poetry and short prose pieces, Mesmer, in 2010, and her full-length poetry collection, How We Mostly Were, was a finalist for the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books. Joanna’s creative and critical work has appeared in a number of journals, including Opium, Lungfull!, Supermachine, Pleiades, elimae, and Boog City. Her work is also forthcoming in Poetry International and South Dakota Review. Joanna has been a visiting professor at Fordham University and Marquette University, and she is currently working on a book of short prose pieces that fall somewhere between the prose poem and micro-essay.
**Lydia Cortes, Straw Gate Press
Lydia Cortes don’t have no URL, but her latest bio is as follows: Lydia Cortes is a long-time New Puertorrican-born resident, raised in New York, but with strong roots in the two cultures of the Boricua and the Brooklyn that spawned her. She is also influenced by the many other cultures and languages she was surrounded by growing up in the Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and East Flatbush nabes and by the schools she attended: PS 55, Francis Scott Key JHS, Girls High, Erasmus Hall HS, and St. John’s U. She has been published in various anthologies and has two collections of poetry, Lust for Lust and Whose Place.
Though she writes mostly in English, she often uses phrases, words, cachets from the other languages she’s fluent in: Spanish and Italian. (During the ’60s and ’70s, she lived in Rome.) She feeds on the slang of all three.
Founded by Phyllis Wat in 2005, Straw Gate Books publishes poetry and occasional related texts. It is particularly interested in works by women and non-polemical writing with underlying social content. Straw Gate also features new authors and authors whose work is underserved.
**Will Edmiston
Will Edmiston is a poet living in Brooklyn. His work has recently appeared in Lungfull!, Bardic Sepulchral, The Recluse, and The Bridge. 3 Sad Tigers Press published his chapbook effie. He volunteers as an archivist for The Poetry Project.
**Emily Einhorn
Toe tapping to belly laughing, Emily Einhorn takes you on a journey. From Texas to Chicago, Nashville to Florida, her melodies will travel home with you and her lyrics will give you reason to want to come on back real soon. She also has a wonderful voice and knows how to use it to split you open and sing to your insides.
**Joe Elliot, Lunar Chandelier Press
Joe Elliot ran a weekly reading series at Biblios Bookstore and Café in NYC for five years, starting in the early ’90s, and helped move the series to Zinc Bar, where it continues today. He co-edited two chapbook series: A Musty Bone and Situations, which published authors such as Antje Katcher, Paul Genega, Duncan Nichols, Mitch Highfill, Kim Lyons, Rich O’Russa, Douglas Rothschild, Shannon Ketch, Lisa Jarnot, Bill Luoma, Kevin Davies, Marcella Durand, Rick Snyder, and many others. Elliot is the author of numerous chapbooks, including You Gotta Go In It’s The Big Game, Poems To Be Centered On Much Much Larger Sheets Of Paper, 15 Clanking Radiators, 14 Knots, Reduced, Half Gross (a collaboration with artist John Koos), and Object Lesson (a collaboration with artist Rich O’Russa). Granary Books published If It Rained Here, a collaboration with artist Julie Harrison. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The World, The Poker, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Torque, Hanging Loose, EOAGH, Occo, Booglit, and Arras. His long poem, 101 Designs for The World Trade Center, was published by Faux Press’ e-mag, and Subpress published a collection of his work, Opposable Thumb. Lunar Chandelier Press published a new set of poems, Homework, last year.
Lunar Chandelier Press, formed in 2009, publishes books of modern, evocative writing. It is inspired by the spirit of the poet and artist-directed productions of the 1920s Paris Left Bank and the various contemporary poetry projects of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal’s right bank: Belladonna Books, Cabinet, Litmus Press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, and Ugly Duckling Presse, as well as the venerable Hanging Loose Press, based in downtown Brooklyn
**Lawrence Giffin, Tea Party Republicans Press
Lawrence Giffin is a poet and archivist living in New York City. He is a member of the loose publishing collective Lil’ Norton, where he is the series editor of the Physical Poets Home Library, an occasional .pdf journal where each issue focuses on a different geographically-specific group of writers. A new book, Sorites, is recently out from Tea Party Republicans Press.
**Stephanie Gray, Litmus Press/Aufgabe
Straw Gate Books published poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray’s first book, Heart Stoner Bingo, in 2007. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, Sentence, The Brooklyn Rail, 2nd Avenue Poetry, EOAGH, The Boog City Reader, and The Recluse. Venues she has read at, often live with her films, include The Projections, Segue, and The Poetry Project Friday series. Her films have shown internationally, including at the Ann Arbor, Oberhausen, Viennale, Videoex, and Antimatter festivals, among others.
Dedicated to supporting innovative, cross-genre writing, Litmus Press publishes the work of translators, poets, and other writers, and organizes public events in their support. We encourage interaction between poets and visual artists by featuring contemporary artworks on the covers of our full-length books and in Aufgabe, our annual literary journal. By actualizing the potential linguistic, cultural and political benefits of international literary exchange, we aim to ensure that our poetic communities remain open-minded and vital.
**Christine Hamm
Christine Hamm is a Ph.D. candidate in English literature. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in The Adirondack Review, Pebble Lake Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, and Rattle, among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at CUNY. She has performed all over the country and was one of the featured poets in the Poetic Voices Festival of Hartnell College. She has two books out, The Transparent Dinner and Saints & Cannibals, and Blazevox [books] is publishing her third, Echo Park. She is a poetry editor for Ping•Pong, a literary journal published by the Henry Miller Library of Big Sur, and is the editor of Like a Fat Gold Watch, an anthology of creative and critical works inspired by Sylvia Plath.
**Ron Horning, Vanitas and Libellum Books
**Ron Horning, Vanitas and Libellum Books:
Ron Horning was raised in Lima, Peru, and São Paulo, Brazil. He works on Wall Street and lives in Beacon, N.Y. His poems and translations have appeared in Vanitas, Gerry Mulligan, Zoland Poetry Journal, Sal Mimeo, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. Costmary Press, in Kent, Ohio recently published three broadsides, and a poem called “Miss You Already” is on line at PinkEye, the “literary arm” of the ClePunk music site.
Vanitas is a journal of poetry, writings by artists, criticism, and essays. Vanitas comes out periodically, providing a forum for international voices with an emphasis on coming to grips with current world situations. Each issue contains writings by artists whose primary modes are non-literary and features the work of a visual artist.
Libellum books was founded in 2004 as a corollary to Vanitas magazine, as a forum for book-length poems, essays, and other texts that might have trouble finding a home in the usual poetry venues. Recent publications include Natural Light by Norma Cole, Revs of the Morrow by Ed Sanders, and The New World by Tom Clark.
**Brenda Iijima, Least Weasel Chapbooks @ Propolis Press
Brenda Iijima was born in the hilly town of North Adams, Mass. Glossematics, Thus is just out from Least Weasel Press. She is the author of Around Sea (O Books); Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press); revv. you’ll-ution (Displaced Press); and If Not Metamorphic (Ahsahta Press), as well as numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL) and editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.
Artist-poet Karen Randall established Propolis Press in 2001 for the purpose of printing fine letterpress artist’s books with poetry by innovative, contemporary authors. The Least Weasel series, launched this year, consists of hand-bound chapbooks with letterpress printed covers.
**Paul Foster Johnson
Paul Foster Johnson is the author of Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and Refrains/Unworkings (Apostrophe Books). With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in Jacket, The Awl, Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Fence, and Octopus. He has served as a curator of the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place and as an editor at Litmus Press/Aufgabe. He lives on the Lower East Side.
**Martha King
Martha King was born in Virginia in 1937. She attended Black Mountain College in the summer of 1955 and married Basil King in 1958. She began writing in the late 1960s, after the birth of their two daughters, Mallory and Hetty.
Living in Brooklyn since 1968, King produced 31 issues of Giants Play Well in the Drizzle in the late 1980s (sent free to interested readers). Her collections of short stories include North & South, Separate Parts, and Little Tales of Family and War. Other stories have been anthologized in Fiction from the Rail and The Wreckage of Reason. A collection of her poetry, Imperfect Fit, was published in 2004.
Currently, King is at work on a memoir, Outside Inside, chapters of which have appeared in Jacket #40, Bombay Gin, Blaze Vox, and New York Stories.
**Austin LaGrone
Born in Baton Rouge, Austin LaGrone is the author of Oyster Perpetual, winner of the 2011 Idaho Prize for Poetry. His recent work is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Willow Springs. He holds degrees from St. John’s College and New York University and teaches at John Jay College in Manhattan.
•
Austin LaGrone was born and raised in Louisiana. According to one legend, he put himself through school bolting 450 transmissions a day to Chevy S-10 engine blocks. According to another, he hiked the Annapurna Circuit in flip-flops, and then, in 2010, his first book, Oyster Perpetual, won Lost Horse Press’ Idaho Prize for poetry.
One of the first things the reader notices upon opening Oyster Perpetual is the volume’s wealth of characters, each possessing the aura of a real human being. The opening poem’s first word is “Carlotta,” who appears twice more in the volume’s 51 poems. In the next poem we meet Cody, recently out of prison, “with a catfish tattooed along his ribcage.” From that point on, in no particular order, we encounter Little Ricky from the GM assembly plant and Geraldine who wants a blackbird; Frank who taught Death a thing or two and Brandy who “came back after/ all those years,” who carved her initials into the Oldsmobile’s paint and left “an embalmed/ bullfrog playing a matchstick banjo.” The speaker’s relations with these characters, along with many others, constitute the heart of this book.
The soul of Oyster Perpetual is to be found in LaGrone’s music. Just listen to the consonants grumble in “Lunchbreak Yodel for Elkhorn Sanitation”—“Someone’s put chicken fingers/ inside my work gloves/ as if the jaws of a garbage truck/ could translate for the hunger of kings”; or hear the vowels sing in “Double Feature”—“Walking home, I saw the yellowed/ grass, the scattered cans,/ and the patch of shade beneath/ the yard-car where the dog sleeps.” The sound effects here are solid, not flashy; they work to join the reader to the book’s characters and situations rather than to position her as an isolated spectator. —Jean-Paul Pecqueur
**Tanya Larkin
Tanya Larkin lives in Somerville, Mass. and teaches Surrealism, Humanities, and English Lit at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline.
**Ronna Lebo, Off the Park Press
Ronna Lebo received an M.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts and teaches at Kean University. She performed for 12 years as Alice B. Talkless, won a Jackie 60 New Artist Award, and was included in two CMJ music festivals. Her poetry has been published in Arbella, Long Shot, Big Hammer, Words, This Broken Shore, Whim Wit, and the anthology Will Work for Peace edited by Brett Axel. Her book Prolapse is a 2011 publication from Off the Park Press.
Off the Park Press is a non-profit small press determined to enrich the deep cross-cultural connection between visual art and poetry. Located in New York City, its intention is to reach out to writers and visual artists, known and unknown, across the country to participate in their experimental collaborative publishing projects. Off the Park also publishes yearly anthologies of poems responding to specific visual art works that appear on the anthologies’ covers.
**Kimberly Lyons
Kimberly Lyons has a new collection of poetry, Rouge, forthcoming from Instance Press. Recent work can be found at Unarmed magazine, Talisman, Peep/Show poetry (online), peaches and bats, and New American Writing. She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press and recently co-organized a one-day conference on the work of poet Robert Kelly held at Anthology Film Archives.
**Magus Magnus, Furniture Press
Magus Magnus lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Just as the “poetic” informs Magnus’ approach to philosophy in Heraclitean Pride (Furniture Press), so too it informs his approach to theater in Idylls for a Bare Stage (forthcoming this fall from twentythreebooks). As for poetry itself, two poems from his book Verb Sap (Narrow House)—“Radical Crumb” and “Empirical / Imperial Demonstration”—appear in the 10th edition of Pearson Longman’s English anthology, Literature. Furniture Press will bring out Magnus’ book-length poem, The Re-echoes, in 2012.
Furniture Press is a publisher of strangely poetical texts and ephemera, all of which play at, but are not limited to, intertextuality and appropriation. Some want to call it poetry, but poetry can express many differing, sometimes conflicting and contradictory concepts. This is what we thrive on: the ambiguation of art and its likenesses. Our poetics follows this process closely, and we look for similar aesthetics in the writers we choose to publish and promote.
**Debrah Morkun
Debrah Morkun is a poet who lives in Philadelphia. BlazeVOX [books] released her first book, Projection Machine, last year. Her second book, The Ida Pingala, is forthcoming. She is a member of The New Philadelphia Poets and curates The Jubilant Thicket Literary Series.
**John Mulrooney
John Mulrooney is a poet, musician, and documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared in Pressed Wafer foldemzine, Fulcrum, and All Small Caps, among others. He is presently working on a film about the life and work of poet John Wieners. He lives in Cambridge, Mass. and talks to people, mostly about poetry and movies, at Bridgewater State University.
**Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Alice James Books published Jean-Paul Pecqueur’s first book of poetry, The Case Against Happiness. New work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, So and So, Gulf Coast, and Fence. Jean-Paul is from the Pacific Northwest; he currently lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches writing at The Pratt Institute.
**Douglas Piccinnini
Douglas Piccinnini is the author of Crystal Hard-On (minutes Books) and Soft (The Cultural Society). He is also the founder of the CROWD Reading Series and, with Josef Kaplan, co-editor of Tea Party Republicans Press.
**Rebecca Satellite
Rebecca Satellite is a songwriter and performer based in Brooklyn. Her debut album, but the sun was a man, was released in the summer of 2010, and she is now writing new material for a follow-up. You can catch her live with Chris Roush (drums) and Angela Phillips (bass).
**Justin Remer
Justin Remer is a filmmaker and the leader of Elastic No-No Band. He is also the head of the fledgling record label Weemayk Music.
**Cariah Lily Rosberg, Don Saddles, and East Egg Press
Cariah Lily Rosberg is 4-1/2 years old and lives in Middlesex, Vt. She is a Waldorf student, an inventor of stories and ideas, and often assists her mother in the kitchen. She is spending the summer at herb camp, studying herbs and spices and visiting the lakes in Vermont. Strawberry Things is her first book of recipes but certainly not the last. She is currently working on a new book of savory desserts, including her newest recipe for lentil ice cream.
Don Saddles is a project run in Brooklyn that was born out of an interest in refurbishing old bicycle and moped saddles. Finding frustration in the cost and style of the saddles they saw in stores, furniture designer Elise McMahon and textile designer Francesca Capone set out to find bike/moped saddles that were being thrown out by bike shops, as well as leather and vinyl scraps from a variety of sources. The saddles are completely hand-made from recycled materials and have been Frankensteined and beautified for your bicycle riding pleasure. And don’t be afraid to ask! We will put the saddle right on your bike for you at no additional cost. Ride on!
East Egg Press brings you a small collection of recipe books with a poetic nature: ROOTS recipe book is a compilation of recipes from a coterie of creative people—painters, carpenters, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, children, and wanderers. Each person was asked to contribute a recipe that was relative to the word “roots” and its varying interpretations. Strawberry Things is a short compilation of recipes that were dictated aloud by Capone’s four-year-old niece. She makes up words, pairs unlikely ingredients, and even provides processes on how to combine and eat the recipes. Her culinary inventions are imaginative, thoughtful, poetic, and humorous recipes that have wisdom and poetic intuition far beyond her years.
**Jesse Seldess
Jesse Seldess recently relocated to Brooklyn from Karlsruhe, Germany. He is the author of two books, Who Opens and Left Having (both Kenning Editions), as well as chapbooks on Hand Held Editions, Instance Press, Answer Tag Press, and the Chicago Poetry Project Press. His work has recently appeared in the journals EOAGH, Jacket, Little Red Leaves, and out of nothing. Since 2001, he has edited and published Antennae, a journal of experimental writing and language-based performance and music scores.
**Evie Shockley, Belladonna
Evie Shockley is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press, 2001). Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2011. Her poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Callaloo, The Nation, qaartsiluni, Black Nature, Talisman, esque, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African-American literature and creative writing.
2011 marks the 12th anniversary of the Belladonna* mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration in and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a conversation about the feminist avant-garde, what it is and how it comes to be.
**Toni Simon
Toni Simon has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center and A.I.R. Gallery. Her illustrated chapbook, Earth After Earth, is forthcoming from Lunar Chandelier Press.
**Emily Skillings, Stonecutter
Emily Skillings is a poet, dancer, and choreographer living in Brooklyn. She earned her B.A. in dance and poetry from The New School in 2010.
Stonecutter is a biannual journal of art and literature, created by a group of New York-based women involved in the arts. Issue One features work from Jen Bervin, Jennifer Cazenave, Anne Fitzgerald, Alan Gilbert, Andrew Gorin, Sarah Holland-Batt, Robert Kelly, Charlotte Mandell, Daniel Nohejl, Lauren O’ Connor, Emily Skillings, Jocelyn Spaar, Ben Townsend, Eliot Weinberger, Jeffrey Yang, and Matvei Yankelevich, with art and photography from Travis Jackson, Orion Martin, and Newsha Tavakolian. To subscribe please visit the above URL or send submissions to stonecutterjournal@gmail.com.
**Mary Austin Speaker
Mary Austin Speaker is the author of two chapbooks—In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys and Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions)—with a third (The Bridge) forthcoming from Push Press. New work is forthcoming in Mrs. Maybe and High Chair, and has recently appeared in Big Bell, Boston Review, Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of Triptych Readings poetry series, and she works as art director for Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
**J. Hope Stein, Ping•Pong
Ping•Pong, a journal of the arts, published annually by The Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California, serves up the best of global arts and literature by publishing a vibrant group of poets, writers, artists, and photographers. Ping•Pong is committed to a cultural dialogue between contemporary artists and the aesthetics created by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Furthermore, Ping•Pong reaches beyond American shores to bring lesser-known writers into more prominence in English.
J. Hope Stein just finished her first book of poetry, The Inventor’s Last Breath. Her short film based on her poetry manuscript was screened at New England College, Hartnell College, Fordham University, and the 2011 CinePoetry Festival at the Henry Miller Library. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Ping•Pong, Tygerburning, and Scapegoat Review. In 2009, she was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She has also published critical work in Web Del Sol Review.
**Leigh Stein, Bone Bouquet
Leigh Stein is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including The Future Comes to Those Who Wait (Grey Book Press). Her first novel, The Fallback Plan, is forthcoming from Melville House in January 2012.
Bone Bouquet is a biannual online journal seeking to publish the best new writing by female poets, from artists both established and emerging. It aims to highlight the important work of female poets, who are often underrepresented in the writing community and popular media. Rather than personal politics, Bone Bouquet’s criteria are excellence and vibrance. Rather than segregating the poetry of “women’s issues” from “regular” creative work, the journal’s goal is to provide an additional arena in which female poets can make their work more visible to readers, building their reputations as artists.
** Tantra-zawadi, Poets Wear Prada
Tantra-zawadi, an award-winning poet/artist/filmmaker from Brooklyn, has performed to standing room audiences at venues as far away as South Africa, London, Germany, and Toronto.
Her most recent collection, Gathered at Her Sky, published by Poets Wear Prada, contains excerpts from her off-Broadway production Soldier Blues and her one-woman performance piece Girl: A Choreospective, as well as the text of previously recorded spoken-word tracks. Chuma Spirit Books published her previous book alifepoeminprogress.
Poets Wear Prada, also known as PWP Books, is a small literary press based in Hoboken, N.J., devoted to introducing new authors through high-quality chapbooks primarily of poetry, since 2006. Angelo Verga, Poetry Curator of The Cornelia Street Café, describes Poets Wear Prada as a “new press, great authors, a publisher who is one miracle short of sainthood.” Meredith Sue Willis of Books for Readers says, “Poets Wear Prada is a poetry publishing house with excellent poets and affordable books with beautiful covers. Have you had your poetry today?” PWP is a proud member of CLMP.
**Helen Vitoria, Gigantic Sequins
Helen Vitoria lives and writes in Effort, Penn. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in over 60 online and print journals, including PANK, wicked alice, Thunderclap, amphibi.us, The Dirty Napkin, Gigantic Sequins, Willows Wept Review, FRIGG Magazine, The Offending Adam, Used Furniture Review, Commonline: A Journal of Culture, Art & Literature, YB Poetry Journal, Fashion for Collapse, Caper Literary Journal, The Cartier Street Review, Poets & Artists Magazine, Sunfish Poetry Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Spooky Boyfriend, Spilt Milk, >kill author, elimae, Metazen, Dark Sky Magazine, Mud Luscious Press, and many others. She has been thrice nominated for Best New Poets 2010 Anthology.
Her chapbooks, The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds and Random Cartography Notes from Gold Wake Press. Blackwater: A Pneumatic Disturbance is her forthcoming e-chap from Red Ochre Press. Her first full length collection: Corn Exchange, will be released in the fall from Scrambler Books.
She is working on her second collection a novel(la) in verse: Amsterdam.
Gigantic Sequins is a biannual, print-only literary arts journal known for its unique design, compelling artwork, and willingness to publish writers and artists in all stages of their careers. Its 2.2 issue debuted this June, and submissions are currently open for its next issue.
**Damian Weber
Damian Weber is a member of House Press and the editor of Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Text.
*Sunday
**Unnameable
**Andrea Ascah-Robinson
Andrea Ascah-Robinson is a poet living in New Haven, Conn. Previously she lived in New York City, where she was the host and co-producer of the reading series Oral Fixation, which was held at Bar 13 from September 1997 to March 1998. She has been a featured reader at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, The Pink Pony, Limelight, The Theatre for the New City, Halcyon, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work appeared in print for the first time in 2000 in The Portable Boog Reader. Her poetry has appeared online at Artsy Mag, Poetry Central, and Poetz.
**Jim Behrle
Jim Behrle lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. His latest chapbook, It Serves Me Right to Suffer, is due out this year.
**Joe Elliot
(see Sat. Aug. 6, 1:10 p.m.)
**Greg Fuchs
Greg Fuchs lives in the Bronx with his wife, Alison Collins, and their son, Lucas. Fuchs has published numerous books of poetry, most recently Moving Pictures from Lew Gallery. Forthcoming are collaborations with Jason Morris for Asterisk and Brett Evans for Open 24 Hours.
**Mark Lamoureux
Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria. BlazeVOX [books] published Astrometry Orgonon, his first full-length collection. He is the author of five chapbooks: Poem Stripped of Artifice (winner of the New School 2007 Chapbook Contest), Traceland, 29 Cheeseburgers, Film Poems, and City/Temple. His work has been published in print and online in Fourteen Hills, Fence, Mustachioed, miPoesias, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Lungfull!, Carve Poems, Coconut, and GutCult, among others. In 2006 he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry.
**Charles Mansfield
Charles Mansfield’s sound has been compared to the likes of Neil Young, Frank Black, and The Mountain Goats. He has written songs since picking up a guitar forever ago. The past few years have seen Mansfield in New York constantly playing in various East Village and Brooklyn clubs. His current EP, All The Way, produced by Bill Racine, reflects a very personal and original approach. Monday Morning, his second EP, will be released this summer. “I want nothing more than to just keep writing, recording and performing and to share my experience and expression with as many people as possible,” he says.
•
As is the case with many artists, there’s a substantial difference between the recorded Charles Mansfield and the live Charles Mansfield.
Mansfield recorded—as evidenced by “Performing” and “All the Way” on his recent All the Way EP—is comprised of quiet songs with a sensitive supporting band. There is subtle piano on the latter track and gorgeous strings on the former.
Mansfield on stage is another matter entirely. He performs alone, with just voice and guitar to do the work of the entire recording ensemble. With no spare instrumentation, Mansfield’s high, sad moan tells most of the story.
“I book people I know will put on a good show and offer something to the audience,” Brian Speaker explains about the performers he’s invited to play The New York Antifolk Festival. “Each act is a well-rounded, talented act with lots to offer in the way of story, sound, and performance. I book folks who I know.
“Charles Mansfield is a dark dude with a sensitive demeanor. He writes with his heart and finds a great groove at the same time.”
Speaker cites “All the Way” as especially evocative. Its memorable chorus line, “Frank Sinatra tried suicide in a hotel elevator,” makes him insist about Mansfield: “Pay attention and you just may learn something.” —Jonathan Berger
**Brett Price
Brett Price lives and writes in Brooklyn, from where he coordinates the Friday Late Night Series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.
**Douglas Rothschild
DglsN.Rthscjhld has not accomplished much, so you probably haven’t heard of him, which is really too bad.
**Kimberly Ann Southwick
Kimberly Ann Southwick is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins. She teaches grammar and literature at Rowan University and lives in Philadelphia. Her poetry has appeared in Big Lucks, The Broome Street Review, elimae, The Portable Boog Reader 3, and Sawbuck, and she has a poem forthcoming in Barrelhouse.
**Nicole Wallace
Nicole Wallace is the program assistant at The Poetry Project and the author of WHITE FLOWERS. More of her work can be found in Ribald Crow Powder Magazine, the Physical Poets Home Library Vol. 4, and 20012.
**Meredith Walters
Meredith Walters was raised in Yorktown, Va., and received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. She curates art and culture programs for the Brooklyn Public Library. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, Spout, Jubilat, Crowd, and Subtropics. Her book, All you have to do is ask, won the 2006 Anhinga Prize for poetry.
**Ian Wilder
Ian Wilder has been co-chair of the Green Party of New York state and has recorded spoken word with the Folk Groovin’ band Nylon & Steel. He and his wife Kimberly blend together politics and art on the above website.
**Zinc
**Austin Alexis
A Favor
While one friend is trying to cope with his daughter’s life-threatening accident, another friend is dealing with financial ruin. The need these two wounded men have for each other forms both the bond and the conflict during a day when both men are heading towards a climax and must make ethical decisions. They both must face the consequences of how they view the responsibilities and the limits of friendship. Roxanne Hoffman directs.
Austin Alexis has had plays performed and/or read at Henry Street Theater, The Samuel French Short Plays Festival, The Field Festivals at P.S. 122, and The Vineyard Theatre, Tribeca Theater Lab. He received Honorable Mention in the First Stage L. A. One-Act Contest. His short stories and poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. His For Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada Press) was named “Pick of the Month” by Small Press Review (California). He received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship and a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is currently working on fiction.
**Charles Borkhuis
Flipper
Can you flip for money? Toss yourself in the air and touch down on the business end of a bun? Wifey’s at home and baby makes three. Lose this job and you’re a burger away from a broken marriage, followed by a quick slide into Nightmare Alley. The sky was hemorrhaging bloody murder. No, it was only ketchup squeezed from the clouds. Starving but fat beyond my means, I was living in a shimmering city of lard. I know … I know my place. Eat corporate dust, suck burger smoke through a hose, and bite the bullet.
Charles Borkhuis is a poet, playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. His eight collections of poems include Afterimage, Savoir-fear, Alpha Ruins, Proximity (Stolen Arrows), and Disappearing Acts, forthcoming from Chax Press. He was a finalist for the W.C. Williams Poetry Award and is a recipient of a Drama-Logue Award. He recently translated New Exercises by Franck Andre Jamme from the French (Wave Books). He was a curator of poetry readings at Segue for 15 years. His poetry readings, interviews, and two radio plays for NPR can be found on the above URL.
**Maria Brandt
The Root People
In The Root People, two young girls share secrets in the woods and in the process discover that isolation can be countered with tenderness.
Maria Brandt was an artistic board member of The Bridge Theatre Company in Boston from 1996 to 2003. She teaches women in literature, dramatic literature, and creative writing at Monroe Community College, where she also directs The Sixth Act, an interdisciplinary drama initiative for faculty and students across campus and in the city of Rochester. The Root People has been workshopped at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Alaska and at Moving Arts Theatre Company in Los Angeles.
**Joel Chace
The Cell
The Cell explores what’s not fun about fundamentalism but also proposes the possibility that the right sort of terrorist just might help her captive emerge, clear, on the other side of himself. Paten Hughes plays the role of Jamey. Her favorite performances include Irina in Three Sisters (directed by Eve Best); Evelyn in The Shape of Things; Portia in the European Premiere of Neil LaBute’s Liar’s Club—part of an Edinburgh Fringe Festival double-bill entitled Tits and Blood; Claire in Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home; and Desdemona in Othello. Adam Klasfeld directs and plays the role of Moe. The artistic director of One Armed Man, Klasfeld is a writer and director drawn to theater that explores suppressed historical narratives and/or new aesthetic ground. Most recently, his docudrama The Report of My Death, about the once-censored and posthumously published details of Mark Twain’s life and work, premiered to widespread critical acclaim in Manhattan.
Joel Chace has published more than a dozen print and electronic poetry collections, including Cleaning the Mirror: New and Selected Poems (BlazeVox [books]), matter no matter (Paper Kite Press), Scaffold (Country Valley Press), b(its) (Meritage Press), A Script (Otoliths Books), Sharpsburg (Cy Gist Press), and Blake’s Tree (Blue & Yellow Dog Press). Two of his plays have been given staged readings in Manhattan: Triptych, at The Arclight Theatre, and Fundamentalism, at Under St. Marks.
**Jennifer Hill
Three Turns
Three Turns explores the relationships of three different couples as their conversations unfold one at a time, and then once again, simultaneously.
Jennifer Hill is a poet, playwright, hoop dancer, editor at Paper Kite Press, and bookseller at Paper Kite Books. She can be found online at the above URLs.
**Vincent Katz
Veranda of The Grand Gables (excerpt)
This play takes off from Tennessee Williams’ use of characters trapped in a transient setting. In place of Williams’ realistic development of character and psychological crises, however, it substitutes out-of-control senses of language and of literature, forcing them into disagreement with a “real world” that is by comparison brutal and insensitive. Shocks of juxtaposition, lapses of ordinary good manners, and severe conflicts based on an inability to communicate render this world by turns hilarious and unsettling.
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots (Hanuman Books), Understanding Objects (Hard Press), and Rapid Departures (Ateliê Editorial). He won the 2005 National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, for his book of translations from Latin, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press). He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and Libellum books.
**Eugenia Macer-Story
Captain Midnight’s Spyglass Heart
Captain Midnight’s Spyglass Heart is a new play in a series of published short stories and plays entitled The Captain Midnight Transmissions, words and music by Eugenia Macer-Story, featuring actors Cathie Boruch and Neal Kodinsky. A magickal adventure with Atlantean sorcerers and spirit mediums loose outside the ordinary timeline.
Photo pictures Kodinsky, Macer-Story, and Boruch.
**Matt Reeck
Panoptical Illusion:
Two prisoners constantly visible, one warden constantly watching. In a world in which you are constantly visible, you are a prisoner. How can you redefine space then? What recourse, then? Actors are Ed Go, the co-founder of Other Rooms Press and co-editor of OR Online Poetry Journal, and Anthony Tavarez, who most recently played several roles in the King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe’s production of Macbeth.
Matt Reeck has published poems and translations. His work appeared this past year in magazines including BOMB, Colorado Review, Fiction International, Juncture, Konundrum Literary Engine Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Magazine, and Two Lines. Work is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Bombay Gin, LA Review, and Quarter after Eight. His dramatic work has appeared at Dixon Place and during St. Ann’s Labapalooza Festival in collaboration with the visual artist Deborah Simon.
*Monday
**Cara Benson
Cara Benson is the author of (made), published by BookThug, and Protean Parade, forthcoming from Black Radish Books. Her chapbook Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation won the 2008 bpNichol Prize. Editor of Predictions (ChainLinks), Benson is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and teaches poetry in a N.Y. State Prison.
**Claire Donato
Claire Donato lives in Brooklyn; writes across genres; and has taught at Hunter College, The New School, Brown University, and 826 Valencia/NYC. Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, and Octopus. She holds an M.F.A. from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. Her first book, Burial, will be published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in Fall 2012.
**Monica A. Hand
Monica A. Hand is a poet and book artist who lives in Harlem, USA. Her manuscript “me and Nina” received a 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and her poems have appeared in Aunt Chloe, Black Renaissance Noire, Naugatuck River Review, The Sow’s Ear, Drunken Boat, Beyond the Frontier, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, and elsewhere. She has an M.F.A. in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University and is a founding member of Poets for Ayiti.
**Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is the author of 19 Names for Our Band (Fence Books) and James Brown Is Dead (Future Plan and Program). His art and writing projects have been exhibited and performed at MoMA/P.S.1, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and, most recently, at Mount Tremper Arts in Mount Tremper, N.Y.
**Ish Klein
Ish Klein is the author of the poetry books Moving Day and Union!, both published by Canarium Press. She lives with Greg Purcell in Amherst, Mass., where they produce the poetry podcast Noslander. Poor Claudia of Portland, Ore. has released success Window, a compilation of her videos.
**Michael Leong
Michael Leong is the author of e.s.p. (Silenced Press), a collection of poetry, and I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books]), a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat. Forthcoming titles include Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail) and The Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-Composition as Explanation (Delete Press).
**Sheila Maldonado
Sheila Maldonado’s poems have been published in Callaloo, Rattapallax, Stretching Panties, The Portable Boog Reader, and online in The Acentos Review.
She teaches creative writing for the City University of New York and through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She divides her time between Washington Heights and Coney Island.
**Ekoko Pauline Omadeke
Ekoko Pauline Omadeke is a graduate of New York University’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program and is a Cave Canem fellow. Her work has been published in No, Dear Magazine and Ars Poetica. She is the founder and former curator of the Southern Writers Reading Series at Happy Ending Lounge.
**Greg Purcell
Greg Purcell’s poetry has appeared in Fence, The Agriculture Reader, Open City, The Exquisite Corpse, and New American Writing. He does a podcast with poet Ish Klein called No Slander, which you can find at the above URL.
**Joe Crow Ryan
Joe Crow Ryan is a Subway busker who has studied acting, movement, and nursing. He studied performance (via TV) with Jimmy Durante, Buddy Ebsen, Ella Fitzgerald, and others. Ryan won an OOBR Award for Outstanding Performance as Helicanus in Pericles in 2001. Performances and the sales of recordings have been his sole source for scant income since 2007. “Living the Dream is like nothing I had dreamt,” he said.
**Kathrin Schaeppi
Kathrin Schaeppi is the author of Sonja Sekula : Grace in a cow’s EYE : a memoir (Black Radish Books, 2011), a poetic memoir in homage to the word pictures of the versatile, underrepresented Swiss poet-painter Sonja Sekula, who lived from 1918 to 1963. Creative and critical work has appeared in diverse hardcopy and online journals. Through her small press, ellectrique, Schaeppi has issued Anne Blonstein’s correspondence with nobody and Spelling ( ) Bound, a collaborative objet d’art in a limited edition. Schaeppi lives in Basel, Switzerland.
**Mark Statman
Mark Statman’s most recent books are the poetry collection Tourist at a Miracle (Hanging Loose) and a translation, with Pablo Medina, of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove Press). Author of Listener in the Snow (Teachers & Writers), and, with Christian McEwen, co-editor of The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (Teachers & Writers), his poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in nine other anthologies, as well as such publications as Tin House, Hanging Loose, Performing Arts Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Hat, Bayou, The Portable Boog Reader 4, Occasional Religion, Washington Square, conduit, Subtopics, The Florida Review, Ping•Pong, and American Poetry Review. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, The Bob Edwards Show, The Leonard Lopate Show, The Moe Greene Poetry Discussion, and PBS New York Voices. He has recently completed Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa and is at work on translating the poems of Mario Benedetti. He is an associate professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School.
*Tuesday
**Black Radish Books
Black Radish Books’ collective editorial focus is to publish and promote innovative books of poetry. Because it operates as a collective, with all member-authors contributing various talents other than the poetic to the publishing of member-authors, Black Radish Books’ goal is to allow members, not the artistic conscience of a press, to dictate the aesthetic. As such, their bent is best described as eclectic, with focus on the difficult and the surprising. All Black Radish Books poets are well-established creators of innovative poetry and have been carefully selected based on the quality of their poetry, their publication history, promotional/marketing ability (as established micro-presses, or as regular promoters of), and demonstrated commitment to actively supporting diverse poetries, poetics, and their numerous aesthetics.
**Bruce Covey
Bruce Covey is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books) and the forthcoming Reveal (Black Radish Books). He lives in Atlanta, where he teaches at Emory University, edits Coconut Poetry, and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series.
**Carrie Hunter
Carrie Hunter received her M.F.A./M.A. from The New College of California Poetics program and edits the small chapbook press ypolita press. Her first book, The Incompossible, is out with Black Radish Books, and she has several chapbooks, including Vorticells (Cy Gist Press), A Musics (Arrow as Aarow), and Diary (Dusie). She lives in San Francisco.
**Mark Lamoureux
(see Sun. Aug. 7, 12:00 p.m.)
**Marci Nelligan
Marci Nelligan is a teacher, poet, and toddler-wrangler. Her first collection of poems is due out this winter from Black Radish Books. In addition, she has published two chapbooks and is the co-editor of Intersection, an interdisciplinary book on Jane Jacobs. Her work has appeared in Jacket, The Denver Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, How2, and other journals. She was the 1999 recipient of Poets & Writers’ “Writers on Site” grant and has an M.F.A. in poetry from Mills College.
**Marthe Reed
Marthe Reed has published two books, Gaze (Black Radish Books) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer, with drawings by Rikki Ducornet (Lavender Ink), as well as two chapbooks, (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations, both part of the Dusie Kollektiv Series. A third chapbook is just out from Dusie Kollektiv 5, a collaboration with poet/artist j/j hastain, post•cards: Lafayette á Lafayette. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPoesias, Big Bridge, Moria, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, and EOAGH, among others. Her manuscript, “an earth of sweetness dances in the vein,” was a finalist in Ahsahta Press’ 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Contest. She has guest edited an issue of Ekleksographia and served as assistant editor for Dusie Kollektiv; she teaches in the English department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she serves as the director of creative writing. Further information about her work can be found on her homepage at the above URL.
**Cat Rockefeller
You remember that last AntiFolk Festival at the Sidewalk, before it got shut down for some urban legendary reason? You remember how, during one of those last nights, Berth Control rocked the house, shocked the crowd, broke some tables, required some hospitalization, and got some stitches? While the band leader, Brent Cole, masterminded that chaos, looking on, somewhat embarrassed between call and response shouts, was the vocalist otherwise known as Cat Rockefeller. Brian Speaker, the Festival’s musical curator, says “Cat Rockefeller is a bad ass! She rocks as a front woman to Berth Control, and her own songs are very personal.”
Playing a minimalist acoustic blues, Cat Rockefeller solo is not about raucous energy, but rather presenting a thoughtful, soulful exploration—the kind that can only be made between a girl, her bedroom, and her recording software.
Regularly touring the Union Square L Station, Rockefeller will take time for an above-ground gig to show off some of her latest material (her latest on bandcamp.com is mere months old). Though she defies easy categorization, Speaker was quick with a description: “No bullshit; just good, honest songwriting with a great voice.” —Jonathan Berger
**Kathrin Schaeppi
(see Mon. Aug. 8, 6:40 p.m.)
**Jill Stengel
(see Fri. Aug. 5, 8:55 p.m.)
**David Wolach
David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. Wolach’s first full-length collection, Occultations, has just been published by Black Radish Books. Other books include the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books]), the full-length “Hospitalogy” (chapbook of the same title forthcoming from Scantily Clad Press), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press).
A former union organizer and performing artist, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Recent work appears in Jacket, Aufgabe, Try Magazine, No Tell Motel, and Little Red Leaves. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, co-curating the PRESS Text Arts & Radical Politics Series there, and is visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop in Language and Thinking.
—
David A. Kirschenbaum, editor and publisher
Boog City
330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H
NY, NY 10001-4754
For event and publication information:
http://boogcity.com/
T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)
Boog City
330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H
NY, NY 10001-4754
For event and publication information:
http://boogcity.com/
T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)
To subscribe free to The December Podcast:
For music from Gilmore boys:
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Filed under: Calendar, events, new york, poetry Tagged: | Basil King, boog city, brooklyn, Dan Fishback, festival, Jeffrey Wright, Joanna Fuhrman, Joy Katz, Manhattan, music festival, NYC, Rebecca Wolff, Small press
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