2.25.2009

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.