John Yau reading: March 14, 2013

Thursday, March 14, 8:00 pm
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative
426 W. Gilman Street, Madison, WI

John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, critic, publisher of Black Square Editions, and freelance curator. His recent books include A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008) and Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). His reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Times. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2006-2011). In January 2012, he started the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend, with three other writers.

He has received grants and fellowships for his poetry, fiction, and criticism from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, Peter S. Reed Foundation, Ingram Merrill Foundation, and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation. His awards include a General Electric Foundation Award, a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Brendan Gill Award. In 2002, he was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Srikanth Reddy Events: March 7-8, 2013

The FELIX Series of New Writing and the Contemporary Literature Colloquium (CLC) of UW-Madison present two events featuring visiting poet and scholar Srikanth Reddy. All events are free and open to the public.

A Reading by Srikanth Reddy
Thursday, March 7, 7:00 pm
7101 Helen C. White Hall
Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
600 N. Park Street

Thinking Transnationally as Poet and Scholar:
A Conversation on Research and Practice with Srikanth Reddy
Friday, March 8, 12:00 pm
7101 Helen C. White Hall
Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
600 N. Park Street

Less formal and more flexible than a conventional academic talk, this conversation is an ideal opportunity to learn more about Reddy’s poetry and scholarship and to ask your questions about it, including such topics as transnationalism as a critical framework, its relationship to genre, what John Ashbery has to do with Walt Whitman, collaborative writing practices, pedagogy inside and outside the writing classroom, and more (e.g. how do i enroll in your class on The Cinematic Lyric?). The conversation will begin with comments from Reddy in which he will briefly discuss his new work-in-progress, “Underworld Lit,” within a transnational context.

Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry–Facts for Visitors (2004) and Voyager (2011)–both published by the University of California Press, and a book-length literary collaboration with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick, titled Conversities (1913 Press, 2011).  Reddy’s critical study, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011 as well.  He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Creative Capital Foundation, among others.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy is currently an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Juliana Spahr reading: October 19, 2012

Photo credit: http://hawaiiw.net/

Friday, October 19, 7:00 p.m.
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, 426 W. Gilman Street, Madison, WI

Juliana Spahr is a poet, scholar, and editor. She is the author of Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow, 2011); The Transformation (Atelos, 2007); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005); Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); and Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996), winner of the National Poetry Series Award. She is Professor of English at Mills College.

Spahr also edits with Jena Osman the book series Chain Links and with nineteen other poets she edits of the collectively funded Subpress. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers, a book about two friends who are writers in a time of war and ecological collapse (forthcoming from City Lights). She has edited with Stephanie Young The Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays in Which We Ponder the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism, In Which We Say We Have Some Ears and Are Willing to Listen, and to Which Some Writers Respond (essay collection) (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP, 2002). And several times she has organized free schools with Joshua Clover: the 95 cent Skool (summer of 2010) and the Durruti Free Skool (summer of 2011).

This event is made possible with support from the UW-Madison Department of English, the Anonymous Fund, and the Center for the Humanities Sawyer Seminar on Biopolitics.

 

Cathy Park Hong reading: October 4, 2012

Trent Miller, Dredgers and Drifters, http://trentmillerart.com/

Thursday, October 4, 7:00 p.m.
Room 7191, Helen C. White Hall, UW-Madison

Cathy Park Hong‘s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, will be published in May 2012 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, and other journals.  She is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

This event is made possible with support from the Department of English, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Anonymous Fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

READING UPDATE

Unfortunately, Laura Sims, one of our scheduled readers for the Tuesday, April 10th reading, has had to cancel. Fortunately, Rebecca Wolff, our other scheduled reader, has agreed to read for the full hour, and will share selections from both her recent poetry and fiction. See you at Rebecca Wolff’s reading soon!

Rebecca Wolff reading: April 10, 2012

"Swahililand," photograph by 13thWitness: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13thwitness/

Tuesday, April 10th, 7:00 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Rebecca Wolff received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1993 and helped to found the journal Fence in 1998. The next nine years of Wolff’s life were devoted to publishing the journal, and also to Fence Books, launched in 2001. During these years Wolff found paying gigs at the Poetry Society of America, BOMB magazine, and as a freelance editor for publications such as BookForum and PenguinPutnam. In 2001 her first book of poems, Manderley, was published by the University of Illinois Press, after having been selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. In September of 2004, Wolff’s second book of poems, Figment, was published by W. W. Norton as a winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize. In 2007, Fence and Fence Books found sponsorship at the University at Albany, in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute, of which Wolff is now a Program Fellow. Her third book of poetry, The King, was published in 2009, and The Beginners, her first novel, was published in 2011.

Rebecca Wolff

***UPDATE: Laura Sims will no longer be able to read at this time. We do hope to feature her at some time.***

Laura Sims is the author of two books of poetry: Stranger (Fence Books, 2009); and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books, Alberta Prize, 2005); and of four chapbooks, including Corrections (Bronze Skull Press, 2006) and Bank Book (Answer Tag Press, 2004). Her work was included in the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), and individual poems have appeared in the journals: Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Aufgabe, Crayon, CAB/NET, Octopus, First Intensity, 26, How2, Parcel, 6X6, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, jubilat, LIT, and Fence, among others. She has published book reviews in Boston Review, Jacket, and Rain Taxi; an overview essay on the work of Diane Williams in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (2003); and the article, “David Markson and the Problem of the Novel,” in New England Review (2008). She is currently writing a series of post-apocalyptic poems, and editing her third poetry manuscript, My god is this a man, due out from Fence Books in 2013.

Laura Sims

G.C. Waldrep reading: February 14, 2012

"On the Balcony," photograph by Miroslav Hak: http://rogallery.com/Hak/Hak-hm.html

Tuesday, February 14th, 7:00 p.m. (Happy Valentine’s Day!)
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

G. C. Waldrep (Ph.D., Duke University; MFA, University of Iowa) is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Bucknell University. He is the author of four full-length collections of poems: Goldbeater’s Skin (2003); Disclamor (2007); Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize; and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, with John Gallaher (2011). His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. His work has earned prizes and residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Campbell Corner Foundation. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature. Waldrep is also the author of Southern Workers and the Search for Community, a historical monograph on the lives of Southern textile workers during the early twentieth century. At Bucknell he teaches creative writing, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review and is the Editor of West Branch. He is the first recipient of the Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professorship in Poetry and Creative Writing.

G.C.'s hat, amidst flowers.

Susan Schultz and Connie Deanovich reading: November 2, 2011

Badger Munitions Dump, May 2011. Photo by Steel Wagstaff

Wednesday, November 2nd, 5:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Susan Schultz is a Professor in the English department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, where she teaches modern and contemporary poetry, American literature, and creative writing. Her critical work includes A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Poetry and Poetics Series, 2005) as well as essays on Denise Riley and adoption, Linh Dinh and disgust, Donald Rumsfeld and political poetry, and the poetries of Hawai‘i. Schultz was the editor (or co-editor) of the collections The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1995) and Multiformalisms (WordTech, 2008).

Her books of poetry include Aleatory Allegories (Salt Press, 2000), Memory Cards & Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001), And Then Something Happened (Salt Press, 2004), and Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008). Schultz is the editor and publisher of Tinfish Press, an independent press based in Hawai’i which publishes an annual journal of experimental poetry from the Pacific, as well as a series of chapbooks and full-length poetry volumes. She also runs a blog.

Susan Schultz

Connie Deanovich is the Whiting Writers Award-winning author of Zombie Jet and Watusi Titanic. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals, including Real Things: An Anthology of Popular Culture in American Poetry, Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975, American Poetry: the Next Generation, New American Writing, Bomb Magazine, World Poets: Scribner Writers Series (Ron Padgett, editor in chief), and Richter 858, published by The Shifting Foundation and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Originally from Chicago where she edited the little magazine B City, Connie now lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Connie Deanovich

Kent Johnson and Patrick Durgin reading: October 6, 2011

Lovebirds. On Mill Road, Milwaukee, WI. May 2011. Photo by Charles Nevsimal: http://paisleyperspective.tumblr.com/.

Thursday, October 6th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Patrick Durgin is the author of Pundits Scribes Pupils (Potes & Poets, 1998), And so on (Texture Press, 1999), Sorter (Duration Press, 2001), Color Music (Cuneiform Press, 2002), Imitation Poems (Atticus / Finch, 2006), and The Route (with Jen Hofer, Atelos, 2007-8). His poets theater script PQRS will be his next book, due out in 2012. He is the editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House and The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner. Recent critical essays appear in Aerial, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Jacket2, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Postmodern Culture. He is editor and publisher of Kenning Editions, and teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Patrick Durgin

Kent Johnson is a poet, translator, and editor, responsible in some way for nearly thirty poetry-related collections, including Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala, 1991) and Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1992). In 1980 and 1983, during the Sandinista revolution, he taught basic literacy and adult education in Nicaragua. From this experience he translated A Nation of Poets (West End Press, 1985), the most representative translation in English from the working-class Talleres de Poesia of Nicaragua. He has also edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters in English (Combo Books, 2005). With Forrest Gander, he has translated Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. Their second book of Saenz’s work, The Night, was published by Princeton in 2008, and also received a Translation Award from PEN. Among other titles, he is author of The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003; rept. CCCP, UK, 2005), Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets (BlazeVox Books, 2004), Dear Lacan (with Preface by Slavoj Zizek, CCCP, 2005), Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz (Effing Press, 2005), I Once Met (Longhouse Books, 2007), Day (The Figures/Blaze Vox, 2009), and A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara (Punch Press, 2010). Translations of his poetry have appeared in over a dozen countries, and three book collections of his work have been translated and published abroad, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and (forthcoming) Argentina. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a large gathering of new and selected poems, appeared from Shearsman Books, in England, in 2008, and a bilingual anthology, Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay, is forthcoming from Shearsman, as well, in 2011. This year, 5 Works by the Rejection Group (co-authored with Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, and Kasey Silem Mohammad) appeared from Habenicht Press. In addition to awards from PEN, Johnson is recipient of a Pushcart Book of the Month Award, an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Award, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Lalicorne Residency in Montevideo. He has taught English and Spanish at Highland Community College for the past two decades and was named the “State Teacher of the Year” for 2004 by the Illinois Community College Trustees Association.

Kent Johnson

See the poster for this reading here.

Carla Harryman reading: March 24th, 2011

"Housesitting" by Jennifer Bastian: http://jenniferbastian.com/

Thursday, March 24th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Poet, essayist, novelist and playwright Carla Harryman currently teaches teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Her two most recent works are The Wide Road (Belladonna, 2011), a multi-genre collaboration with poet Lyn Hejinian, and Open Box and Other Works, a sound/music/text collaboration with Jon Raskin and the Jon Raskin Quartet (CD forthcoming Rastafan, 2011). She has published thirteen single-authored works, including Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (2001) and has received numerous grants and awards including from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America, and the Fund for Poetry. One of the original innovators of San Francisco Poets Theater, Harryman’s avant-garde theater and polyvocal performance works have been presented in San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Auckland, the United Kingdom, Austria, and Germany, and her writing has been translated into a number of European languages. Harryman was a contributor to The Grand Piano, co-edited Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker, and guest edited a forthcoming special issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory entitled ”non/narrative”.

Carla Harryman

See the poster for this reading here.