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.

OCTOBER : Brolaski, Carnahan, Hall

Join us Wednesday, October 15 for the next queer installment

featuring:

JULIAN T. BROLASKI
KERRY CARNAHAN
and
JAMES ALLEN HALL

Unnameable Books / 7pm / free

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JULIAN T. BROLASKI co-curated the the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005 (with Cynthia Sailers) and the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006. Brolaski is the author of the chapbooks Hellish Death Monsters (Spooky Press 2001), Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press 2003), The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary's Diary (Cy Press 2005) and the defunct blog Swimming for Dummies (under the name Tanya Brolaski). Xe is a poetry editor at Litmus Press in Brooklyn and is writing es dissertation on rhyme in medieval, Renaissance and Apache poetries.

Brooklyn resident KERRY CARNAHAN has co-authored and edited a number of publications, including the New York City High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines, Cool and Green Roofs, and Sustainable Urban Sites (forthcoming).

JAMES ALLEN HALL is the author of Now You're the Enemy, which was selected for the 2008 University of Arkansas Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award. His poems and personal essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Boston Review, Redivider, American Letters and Commentary, and others. He is working on a memoir (tentatively titled I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well) and a second book of poems. He teaches creative writing at SUNY--Potsdam.

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down one flight of stairs at Unnameable Books, 456 Bergen Street, Brooklyn.

September 17: Colic + Gardinier + Liu

Bring your queer ears forth to hear September's Uncalled-For poets:

DANICA COLIC

SUZANNE GARDINIER

&

TIMOTHY LIU

Wednesday September 17 / 7 pm /free

DANICA COLIC lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Hunter College, where she also received her MFA. Her poems have appeared in Terrain, Realpoetik, Arts & Letters, and Pebble Lake Review.

SUZANNE GARDINIER is the author of The New World, A World That Will Hold All the People, and Today: 101 Ghazals. Next year Sheep Meadow will publish another of her long poems, called Dialogue with the Archipelago. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

TIMOTHY LIU has two new books forthcoming, Bending the Mind around the Dream's Blown Fuse (Talisman House) and Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Books). He lives in Manhattan.

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as usual, we'll be downstairs at Unnameable Books, 456 Bergen St. Brooklyn NY.

August 13 = Jack Lynch + Laura Newbern + Miller Oberman

Climb down into the cellar of Unnameable Books

for another summer Wednesday reading

to hear the poems of your friends or strangers

JACK LYNCH

LAURA NEWBERN

&

MILLER OBERMAN

Wednesday August 13 / 7pm / free

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JACK LYNCH received his BFA from the New School and he holds an MFA from Hunter College. His poetry has appeared in Ology, POZ Magazine, various on-line literary journals, as well as the forthcoming issue of The Paterson Literary Review. Jack’s short story “Cocktails With Jennifer” can be found in the anthology Diva Complex, which will be published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2009. He lives in New York City.

LAURA NEWBERN's poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and are anthologized in Urban Nature and Best New Poets 2007. Her manuscript Love and the Eye has been a finalist for several first-book awards. She teaches at Georgia College and is the Poetry Editor of Arts & Letters.

MILLER OBERMAN was the 2005 recipient of Poetry Magazine's Ruth Lilly Fellowship and has recently had poems in Bloom Magazine, the minnesota review, and Lilith.

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Readings are held down one flight of stairs in the basement of Unnameable Books, at 456 Bergen Street (between Flatbush Ave. & 5th Ave.) in Brooklyn, NY, one half block from the 2/3 at Bergen, or a short walk from 4/5/B/D/N/Q/R at Atlantic/Pacific.

Uncalled-For in July: Funaro + Legaspi + Sanyal

Bring friends, bring wine, bring yourselves...
down to the lower depths of Unnameable Books again
to hear friends or strangers

MAYA FUNARO
JOSEPH O. LEGASPI
&
RONICA SANYAL

Wednesday July 16 2008/ 7:00 pm /free

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MAYA FUNARO completed her MFA in poetry at Hunter College this spring. She works in the field of entertainment and copyright law, and has studied printmaking, bookbinding and letterpress printing in Providence, Bologna and New York. She's from New Jersey and lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

JOSEPH O. LEGASPI is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press). Born in the Philippines, he was raised there and in Los Angeles where he immigrated with his family when he was twelve. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, recent works appear in Callaloo, North American Review, Poets & Writers, New York Theater Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gay & Lesbian Review and the anthology Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton). A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets. Visit him at www.josepholegaspi.com.

Sometimes, in the wee hours of the night, RONICA SANYAL writes her novel in hospital back rooms teeming with bacteria. The colonization and domination properties of the roiling bacteria remind her of war and how we may all one day succumb to the inevitable biological battleground. Are hospital-based infection deaths better than death by terrorists? She asks you to reconsider your allegiance to the War on Terror fight because this type of completely imaginary, explosive death (in these days of prolonged, science-filled, terrible life) would most likely be a kinder one. Ronica is one of the founders of the writing group, Agent 409.

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Readings are held down one flight of stairs in the basement of Unnameable Books, at 456 Bergen Street (between Flatbush Ave. & 5th Ave.) in Brooklyn, NY, one half block from the 2/3 at Bergen, or a short walk from 4/5/B/D/N/Q/R at Atlantic/Pacific.

Uncalled-For Reading Series, First Reading!

at Unnameable Books

Wednesday June 18 2008 / 7:00 pm / free

featuring

Tamiko Beyer
Ana Božičević
Tisa Bryant
&
Daniel Lin

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TAMIKO BEYER'S work has appeared numerous journals including Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Gay and Lesbian Review, The Progressive, and the anthology Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Work by Asian American Women. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a member of Agent 409, a multi-racial, queer writing group based in New York City. Through the NY Writers Coalition, she leads writing workshops for homeless LGBTQ youth, and she works as a freelance writer. She will be pursing an M.F.A. at the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis, beginning in the fall.

ANA BOZICEVIC emigrated to NYC from Croatia in 1997. She's the author of chapbooks Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). Fresh poems are forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, absent, typo, and elsewhere. Ana co-edits RealPoetik with Caroline Conway.

Poet, writer and radical cineaste TISA BRYANT makes work that often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history. Her first book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), is a collection of hybrid essays that remix master narratives in film, literature and visual arts to zoom in on the black presences operating within them. She teaches writing at St. John’s University, Queens, lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and is a founding editor/publisher of the hardcover annual, The Encyclopedia Project.

DANIEL LIN has published poems in Chelsea, Verse, Washington Square, Agni and Indiana Review, as well as a chapbook, Tinder, with Nightboat Books. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers Conference and a NY Times fellow in NYU's graduate writing program. He is currently working on a campus novel.

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Unnameable Books can be found at 456 Bergen Street (between Flatbush Ave. & 5th Ave.) in Brooklyn, NY, one half block from the 2/3 at Bergen, or a short walk from 4/5/B/D/N/Q/R at Atlantic/Pacific.

Readings are held down one flight of stairs in the basement.