Wednesday 1/6: Cyrus Cassells, Tim Peterson (Trace) and Magdalena Zurawski

CYRUS CASSELLS
TIM PETERSON (TRACE)
&
MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI

on January 6, 2010 / 7pm at Unnameable Books

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Cyrus Cassells is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, and More Than Peace and Cypresses. His fifth book, The Crossed-Out Swastika, and a translation manuscript, Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, are forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants, and a Lambda Literary Award. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos and has served on the faculty of Cave Canem, the African American Poets Workshop. He divides his time between Austin, New York City, and Paris, and works on occasion in Barcelona as a translator of Catalan poetry.

Tim Peterson (Trace) is the author of Since I Moved In which received the Gill Ott Award from Chax Press. Chapbooks include the recent Violet Speech (2nd Avenue Poetry), as well as CUMULUS (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and Trinkets Mashed into a Blender (Faux Press). Peterson continues to edit EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts which features a special issue on Queering Language dedicated to kari edwards(http://chax.org/eoagh). Peterson also curates TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice, a talks series titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at CUNY Graduate Center which explores the intersection of queer poetics and the manifesto (http://tendenciespoetics.blogspot.com).

Magdalena Zurawski's novel The Bruise won the 2008 Lambda Award for lesbian debut fiction. Currently she is working on a manuscript of poems. She lives in Durham, NC.

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down one flight of stairs.
hosted by Danica Colic & Ari Banias

November 18: CAConrad, Betsy Fagin, and Rachel Levitsky

Wednesday November 18, 7pm

downstairs at Unnameable Books

CAConrad, Betsy Fagin, & Rachel Levitsy


CACONRAD is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com and also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com

BESTY FAGIN is the author of Belief Opportunity (Big Game Books, 2008), Rosemary Stretch (dusie e/chap, 2006) and For every solution there is a problem (Open 24 Hours, 2003), as well as a number of self-published chapbooks. She received degrees in literature and creative writing from Vassar College and Brooklyn College and completed a MLS degree in Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Recent work appears online at La Fovea (http://lafovea.org/La_Fovea/betsy_fagin.html) and is forthcoming in the anthology Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days (University of Iowa Press). She is currently living in Brooklyn, NY.

RACHEL LEVITSKY’s second book, NEIGHBOR, is published by Ugly Duckling Presse (2009). Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books. She’s released five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. With Jan Lauwereyns she is currently guest editing DWB, in the 2010 issue of the Dutch language magazine, “The Empire of Women.” She was the founder and is now a collective member of Belladonna* a multi-faceted feminist avant-garde writing confluence. For paid work, she is an adjunct professor and is currently teaching literature and comp courses for the Bard Prison Initiative and for Eugene Lang College at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in Staten Island.

October 28: Katz, Masini, and Teare

three poets:

AMANDA KATZ
DONNA MASINI
BRIAN TEARE

Wednesday October 28 / 7pm / free

AMANDA KATZ is a writer, editor, translator, and critic. Formerly an editor at Bloomsbury USA, she received her MFA in poetry from Brown University in 2009. She has published poetry and translations in journals including Aufgabe, EOAGH, The Germ, and the New Yinzer, and her book reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She is the editor of Fox Point Press, and she lives in Beacon, New York.

DONNA MASINI was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. Her first collection of poems, That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poet's Prize. Her second book was a novel, About Yvonne ( W.W. Norton and Co., 1997) which the New York Times called “a stunning novel of sexual obsession.” In 2004, she published her second collection of poems, Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co.) Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including APR, Open City, TriQuarterly, Paris Review, KGB BAR Book of Poems, Parnassus, Boulevard, Lyric, et al. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, et al, she is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program. She is currently at work on The Good Enough Mother, a novel.

A recipient of Macdowell Colony, National Endowment for the Arts and Stegner fellowships, BRIAN TEARE is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Sight Map and the forthcoming Pleasure. He’s also published three chapbooks, including Transcendental Grammar Crown and ­, which won the 2009 Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award. His poetry and criticism have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, HOW2, Provincetown Arts, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, Seneca Review, Verse and VOLT, as well as in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and At the Barriers: The Poetry of Thom Gunn. He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

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inside/downstairs

August 19: Emergency, Freeman, and Johnson

Join us back at Unnameable Books for our last reading of summer

featuring

Ammi Emergency
Valentine Freeman
& Paul Foster Johnson

Wednesday August 19/ 7 pm / free

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AMMI EMERGENCY is a Wallace Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford University, where she is at work on an interconnected short story collection about the year after Hurricane Katrina. A native New Yorker, Ammi was living in New Orleans at the time of the storm and, after evacuating, spend time in Texas, Kentucky, Michigan, Brooklyn and Arkansas, all the while observing how people reacted to displacement and to the changes in the country and the natural world. Ammi has written the zine Emergency since 1998.

VALENTINE FREEMAN is a poet and archivist from Portland, Oregon. Twice the recipient of the Burnam Award for Poetry, she lectures and facilitates workshops about lesbian history and queer gender, and recently taught a writing workshop with incarcerated women and their daughters. Valentine lives in Brooklyn and is currently at work on a short play, two essays, and a long list.

PAUL FOSTER JOHNSON's first collection of poetry, Refrains/Unworkings, was published in 2008 by Apostrophe Books. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of literary journals, including Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Pom2, Fence, The Portable Boog Reader 2, Antennae, Bird Dog, and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006, he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and currently lives in New York, NY.

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Tuesday, July 21, Bryant Park Reading Room: Ana Božičević, Jericho Brown, Suzanne Gardinier

Uncalled-for Readings teams up with Word for Word & Bryant Park for a special reading!

Ana Božičević, Jericho Brown, and Suzanne Gardiner read poems

RAIN OR SHINE

Letterpress chapbooks by Micah Slawinski Currier

TUESDAY, July 21 / 7:30 pm / Bryant Park Reading Room* / free

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Ana Božičević emigrated to NYC from Croatia in 1997. Her first book, Stars of the Night Commute, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press in Fall 2009. She's also the author of fresh chapbooks The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn (Dusie Press) and God, Sebastian, Amy (Flying Guillotine Press), as well as Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). Look for her recent work in Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Forklift, Ohio, absent, typo, fou and elsewhere. With Amy King, she is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic (Factory School, forthcoming).

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies. Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego. New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book, PLEASE.

Suzanne Gardinier is the author of the long poem Dialogue with the Archipelago (Sheep Meadow, 2009), Today: 101 Ghazals (Sheep Meadow, 2008), and the long poem The New World (Pittsburgh 1993), chosen by Lucille Clifton for the Associated Writing Programs Award Series in poetry in 1992. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

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Bryant Park Reading Room is located at 42nd St. between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan.

*Rain location is the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, 20 W. 44th St between 5th & 6th Aves, just 2 blocks north of Bryant Park.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to us, June 17

Come celebrate with us out back at the new Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt Ave!

KAT CASE
JULY COLE
MISTY HARPER
DANIEL LIN

Wednesday June 17 / 7pm / Unnameable Books / free

letterpress by Micah Slawinski Currier

beer + snacks

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A recent San Francisco transplant, KAT CASE is NYC Teaching Fellow at a public high school in East New York, where she teaches English and lets her students use the words "wylin" and "bitchass” in their short stories. She has written and carefully duct-taped several issues of the zine Snapshots; the most recent issue was The Bro-Job Chronicles, where it doesn’t matter as long as there’s a warm mouth. As a tutu-wearing, bourbon-spilling columnist for Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll for five years, she covered queer punks, sexual politics, and even the occasional brilliant show. Right now, she’s trying to find time in-between lesson planning to finish writing a novel about a beat-era woman artist which explores the meaning of success in a world where neither the lives of harlots nor the creation of useless objects are valued.

JULY COLE is a displaced Appalachian transsexual now studying poetry and environmental science at the University of Montana. He swam the Bitterroot River and the North Fork of the Flathead this year in mid-May, his earliest start yet.

MISTY HARPER studied poetry at Indiana University and Georgia Tech. She lives in Atlanta. In 2005, her chapbook Guarding the Violins was chosen for the PSA chapbook series.

DANIEL LIN has a chapbook, TINDER, from Nightboat Books, and has recently published poems in Unsplendid, Notre Dame Review and The Jewish Quarterly. He was a N.Y. Times Fellow at NYU and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He co-edits Love among the Ruins, which will publish limited-edition chapbooks and an online journal.

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MAY 20: E. Tracy Grinnell, Laura Jaramillo, and Jenny Johnson

Join us at Barrette again for fantastic queer poets

E. TRACY GRINNELL
LAURA JARAMILLO
&
JENNY JOHNSON

Wed May 20 / 7pm / Free

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E. TRACY GRINNELL is the author of Helen: A Fugue (Belladonna Books Elder Series #1 with Leslie Scalapino, 2008), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books 2006) and Music or Forgetting (O Books 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks Leukadia (Trafficker Press, 2008), Humoresque (Dusi/e-chap kollectiv, 2008), Hell and Lower Evil (Lyre Lyre Pants on Fire Press, 2008), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks, 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2004), and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 2000). Since 2001, she has edited Litmus Press and its annual journal of poetry and translation, Aufgabe. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

LAURA JARAMILLO is a poet from Queens. She's the author of The Reactionary Poems(Olywa Press). Her work has appeared in Pocket Myths: The Odyssey, P-QUEUE, X-Connect, The Poker, and other journals.

JENNY JOHNSON is an M.F.A. candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her poem “Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner” appeared in the anthology Best New Poets 2008. She currently lives in Charlottesville, VA where she is assistant director of the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia.

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Barrette is wheelchair accessible

April 22: KING + SIME + THOMPSON: in a new venue!

AMY KING / RICHARD SIME / L.B. THOMPSON

Wednesday, April 22 / 7pm / free

Barrette (new venue!)

601 Vanderbilt Ave. @ Bergen St.

Brooklyn, NY

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AMY KING is th author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, and forthcoming, Slaves to do These Things (Blazevox Books). She teaches English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College, moderates the Poetics and Women's Poetry listserves, and co-curates The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series (http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/). Please visit her at http://amyking.org for more.

RICHARD SIME grew up in rural North Dakota, graduated from college in Minnesota, moved to New York City to attend graduate school at NYU, drifted into publishing, and eventually returned to school at Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned an MFA in fiction writing and where a course on prosody planted a seed. He began to write poetry in workshops at the New School in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where he returns each summer. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Provincetown Arts, Radical Faerie Digest, and Passager.

L.B. THOMPSON received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University. Her poetry has been published in journals including Fence, Pool, Lyric, The Women's Review of Books and The New Yorker. She received an award for emerging women writers from the Rona Jaffe Foundation in 2002, and won the Center for Book Arts’ annual chapbook competition in 2003. L.B. teaches English to college freshmen, works as a free-lance copyeditor, and lives on the North Fork of Long Island.

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Barrette is wheelchair accessible.

MARCH: Joblin, Levi, Oliver, Schneiderman

Our Wednesday, March 25 reading will feature these poets

and letterpress cards of their poems!

As always
7pm / Unnameable Books / free

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ALANA JOBLIN grew up in Philadelphia. Prior to making Brooklyn her home eight years ago, she earned her B.A. at Oberlin College, studying English and Religion. Alana earned her MFA in poetry at Hunter College, where she has also taught undergraduate literature and creative writing. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, and RealPoetik.

Skyspeak is JAN HELLER LEVI'S second book of poems; her first collection, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Levi is also the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1994), which Utne Review named on their Loose Canon list of "150 Great Works Guaranteed to Set Your Imagination on Fire"; she is consulting editor for the new edition of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (2005) and co-editor of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005). Her poems have appeared in Field, Mid-American Review, and other journals, and in anthologies including Poetry 180 and Bowery Women Poets. In Black Warrior Review, Mark Sullivan described Levi as "a poet whose humanity encompasses both our urge for completeness and our necessary dwelling in the work-in-progress of the world." She is an Associate Professor at Hunter College in New York, where she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

AKILAH OLIVER is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999, Winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award), a book of experimental prose-poetry. Her chapbooks include a (A)ugust (Yo-yo Labs, 2007), The Putter’s Notebook (Belladona, 2006), and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet which was published by Farfalla Press (2005) in a text-and performance CD edition. Oliver’s work is included on the CD “Matching Half”, featuring Anne Waldman, which won CA Conrad’s “sexiest poet alive” award. She is faculty at The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she also taught at CU-Boulder. She held the Distinguished Author position in the Creative Writing Department at Long Island University (Spring, 2008) and was curator of the Monday Night reading series at the Poetry Project in NYC (2007-2008). She is a founding member of The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, which performed out of Los Angeles in the 1990s. She currently makes her home in Brooklyn, NY. Oliver has a new book, A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press 2009).

JASON SCHNEIDERMAN is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2005), American Poetry Review, Tin House, Poetry London, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He is currently a Chancellor's Fellow in the Doctoral Program in English at the Graduate Center of CUNY. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband Michael Broder.

FEBRUARY: Becker, Broder, Fetzer, Weir

First reading of 2009!

Wednesday, February 18 will feature:

PRISCILLA BECKER
MICHAEL BRODER
CHELSEA LEMON FETZER
&
JOHN WEIR

LETTERPRESS BROADSIDES by Micah Slawinski Currier of Woodside Press

7 pm / Unnameable Books/ free

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PRISCILLA BECKER's first book of poems, Internal West, won The Paris Review book prize, and was published in 2003. Her second book, Stories That Listen, is forthcoming from Fourway. Her poems have appeared in Open City, The Paris Review, Fence, Small Spiral Notebook, Raritan, Verse, American Poetry Review, and The Boston Review; her music reviews in The Nation and Filter magazine; and her essays in Open City and Cabinet magazine. Her essays have also been anthologized by Sarabande, Soft Skull Press, and Anchor Books.

MICHAEL BRODER holds an MFA from New York University and is completing a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Court Green, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His essay on Sappho is included in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack and due out from the University of Wisconsin Press this spring.

CHELSEA LEMON FETZER received her MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. In 2006, she was chosen as second place winner for poetry by the Summer Literary Seminar in Kenya, and in summer 2008 was the John O. Killens Scholar in Fiction for the inaugural Pan African Literary Forum. Her work has appeared in Stone Canoe, Callaloo, and is upcoming in Tin House. She is currently living in Brooklyn and working on her first novel, Rivermaps.

JOHN WEIR is the author of two novels, What I Did Wrong, and the Lambda Award-winning The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, New South, Tri-Quarterly, Spin, Details, and Rolling Stone, and in various anthologies, including Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction, Between Men: Original Fiction by Today's Best Gay Writers, and the upcoming Between Men 2. He has taught in the MFA Creative Writing programs at Queens College/CUNY and the University of Houston, and he is currently Director of the MA English program at Queens College.