Welcome to Malvern Books!
Malvern Books is now closed. Malvern Books was a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas. We specialized in visionary literature and poetry from independent publishers, with a focus on lesser-known and emerging voices.
An Update from the Manager of Malvern Books
Dear Friends,
We’ve had a wonderful time sharing our favorite books with you over the past nine years, and it’s been an honor to celebrate the work of so many brilliant writers through our readings and events.
Malvern Books is the realization of Joe Bratcher’s vision—Joe dreamt of a bookstore that would carry the books he loved, mostly poetry and fiction from small, independent presses. He wanted to promote writers and translators of books from other countries, while also championing the work of local writers.
When Joe first talked to me about opening Malvern Books, I must admit I was skeptical. I didn’t think we’d find an audience. It was 2012 and everyone was saying that bookstores were dead, Kindle and online shopping were the future. I anticipated many quiet sales days, with Joe and I just sitting there, looking at each other. He told me if that’s how it ended up, well, at least we’d have a chance to chat—and since we always seemed to laugh a lot when we talked, it sounded like a good way to spend some time. And so from then on, whenever we’d have a really slow sales day, with just a few people coming in, we’d look at each other and say, “We’re living the dream!” and we’d laugh.
But back to opening… in early 2013, with the help of our amazing architect, contractor, and interior designer, we created the space that Joe had in mind. We started posting on social media thanks to Tracey, our wonderful digital media manager and first Malvern hire. And we were so grateful to the many enthusiastic writers and readers who expressed their excitement at the imminent arrival of Malvern Books. From the very beginning it felt like we were building a community.
We opened our doors in October 2013, and we were shocked by how many people came by. You showed up and you loved what we had to offer! You constantly surprised and humbled us with your kind words and helpful suggestions. People from out of town would visit the store because a local friend had told them they had to come by, and we received much appreciated shout-outs from the Austin Chronicle and numerous other newspapers and journals.
And then 2020 hit—but even with the pandemic, we had loyal customers who came by for curbside pick ups, signed up for individual shopping appointments, and participated in our Zoom book clubs and events. If we didn’t say it enough, THANK YOU!
All along the way, we were lucky enough to have truly wonderful staff members who loved the books we carried and who helped us build the store we have now. Their work has been invaluable and we could not have done this without them.
On July 28th of this year, we lost Joe. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to try and carry on in this space without him. Our little Malvern world has not been the same since, and, as much as we love this store and our amazing customers, Malvern Books simply cannot continue without our Joe.
Malvern Books will be closing on December 31st, 2022. It has been a wonderful nine years and we thank each and every one of our cherished customers, friends, staff, and suppliers for helping us along the way.
As we move forward, we’ll be sharing our plans with you for sales and specials. For now, we just wanted to let you know this was coming. We hope you all continue to seek out works in translation and books published by small presses—there is so much great stuff out there—and that you continue to support our local independent bookstores, like our dear friends at BookWoman, among others. But, most importantly, we hope to see you in the store sometime soon, to say goodbye and to thank you, both for being the readers that you are and because you have come with us on this incredibly fulfilling journey in Joe’s world.
With heartfelt thanks and wishing you all the best,
Becky Garcia,
Manager, Malvern Books
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| Albert Huffstickler Birthday Celebration 7:00 pm Albert Huffstickler Birthday Celebration Dec 17 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm  Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park: Albert Huffstickler. Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his … Continue reading | ||||||
Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park: Albert Huffstickler.
Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe, who will be reading tonight, describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”
Join us for an afternoon with cartoonist, artist, and activist Issa Nyaphaga. Issa will be discussing his latest collection of political cartoons, Art Stronger Than Hate (Alamo Bay Press). And we’ll get the afternoon off to a lively start with Mae Stoll and DrumForFun, a group of hand drummers who play and celebrate West African rhythms on traditional West African instruments.
Issa Nyaphaga is a renowned artist, activist, and educator who addressed the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this year on the subject of freedom of artistic expression. After exile from his native country of Cameroon, he lived in Paris for ten years, where he worked at Charlie Hebdo. He now lives in Santa Fe, teaching at the community college and the Tarnoff Art Center.
Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review! The keynote poet is Celeste Guzman Mendoza, author of Beneath the Halo (Wings Press, 2013). This new issue also includes a special section by the CantoMundo Fellows.
An engaging photography series, ‘Wonder World’ by Rebecca Dietz, is showcased in Issue 42 and is on exhibit at Malvern Books from April 25th-May 9th.
Borderlands is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
It’s Bloomsday! Join us for a celebration of the life of writer James Joyce. Featuring live Irish music from Aidan, readings from Ulysses with an introduction by Joyce aficionado Peter Q, the moderator of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group, plus spirited discussion (audience participation welcome!)… and suitably Irish snacks.
Bloomsday, named for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, is observed around the world on June 16th, as this is the date during which the events of Ulysses are relived (16th June, 1904). Fun fact: Joyce apparently picked June 16th as it was the date of his first date with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.
Join us in celebrating Banned Books Week with The Freedom to Read Foundation!
This event will feature a “read out,” with special guests, including Tish Hinojosa, Sarah Bird, and Mark Smith (Director of the Texas State Library and Archives), reading from their favorite banned books. Audience members are also welcome to read. Attendance is free, but donations to The Freedom to Read Foundation will be gratefully accepted.
The Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) is a non-profit legal and educational organization that was founded in 1969 to protect and defend the First Amendment to the Constitution and support the right of libraries to collect—and individuals to access—information. The Foundation is devoted to the principle that the solution to offensive speech is more speech, and the suppression of speech on the grounds that it gives offense to some infringes on the rights of all to a free, open and robust marketplace of ideas.
October 7, 2015 marks the 60th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” To honor the occasion, Malvern Books is hosting a crowd-sourced performance of the poem, featuring people from all over Austin. The event emphasizes the religious nature of the piece, combining elements of worship from various spiritual traditions into one magical night of community.
For more info and to sign up to read, email: whoppe@austincc.edu
Opening day seems like it was only yesterday, but in fact Malvern Books turns TWO this week. And we’re celebrating our second anniversary in fine style, with music, readings, and cake. Come on down and join the party!
* Also worth noting: there will be 25 % off everything in the store all day! *
At 2pm, you’re invited to join us for a communal reading of Kenneth Koch’s epic 104-stanza poem “When the Sun Tries to Go On” (from The Hasty Papers)… come and read a verse or two, and enjoy some birthday cake as your reward.
At 6pm, we’ll enjoy live music from Americana roots duo Mark Viator & Susan Maxey.
And at 7pm, we’ll rock out further with a little Poetry Karaoke. (It’s easy: you roll a lettered die and then select from our shelves a poem by a poet whose last name starts with the letter the die landed on—and then you read this poem aloud for everyone to enjoy!)
Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park: Albert Huffstickler.
Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe, who will be reading tonight, describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”
Join us in celebrating the release of Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press), edited by Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov. This event will feature readings from Marcela Sulak and contributors Katie Cortese, Joy Ladin, and Julio Ortega.
Family Resemblance explores hybrid literary genres in depth, providing craft essays and examples of hybrid forms by 43 distinguished authors, including Julie Marie Wade, Takashi Hiraide, Maggie Nelson, Joe Wenderoth, and Etgar Keret. In this study of eight hybrid genres—including lyric essay, epistolary, poetic memoir, prose poetry, performative, short-form nonfiction, flash fiction, and pictures made of words—the family tree of hybridity takes delightful shape, showcasing how cross-genre works blend features from multiple literary parents to create new entities, forms that feel more urgent than ever in today’s increasingly heterogeneous landscape.
Austin Community Salutes Springtime and the Belle of Amherst. Hosted by W. Joe Hoppe and Brett Reeves.
In this crowd-sourced, participation-based event, we will resurrect the poems of Emily Dickinson, hauling them out of the schools and into the streets. This is church for people who don’t go to church. We will read aloud, sing aloud, and expound aloud, using Ms. D’s poems as our starting point. Participants draw poem numbers from a hat, or may choose their favorite Dickinson poem. When your number’s up, you stand and read.
Sponsored by Brett Reeves Educator and Malvern Books.
Join us in celebrating the release of Becoming the Virgin, the debut poetry collection from Malvernite Taylor Jacob Pate. Featuring readings from Taylor and assorted Malvern staff members, including Fernando Flores, Schandra Madha, Matthew Hodges, and Stephanie Goehring.
Join us in celebrating the release of the latest issue of Hothouse Literary Journal.
Hothouse Literary Journal is the official journal for the UT English Department. They publish poetry, nonfiction, and fiction stories from multiple genres every year. The release event consists of readings from the published authors and a chance to own a free copy of Hothouse.
Join us in celebrating the release of the latest issue of Analecta, the official Literary and Arts Journal at the University of Texas.
An entirely student-run publication, Analecta is produced by a small group of undergraduate students committed to finding exceptional work by both undergraduate and graduate students at UT. Analecta features a manifold collection of poetry, prose (both essays and fiction), dramatic works, and visual arts.
Join us in celebrating the release of the Spring 2016 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review. Students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.
Join us in celebrating the launch of two new books: Tony Burnett’s The Reckless Hope of Scoundrels – selected poems 1985-2015 and Carlotta Stankiewicz’s Haiku Austin (love song to Austin / in 17 syllables / wonderful and weird).
Educated at University of North Texas, Tony Burnett is an award-winning poet, journalist, activist, and songwriter. His poetry and short fiction have been published in national literary magazines and anthologies including Sixfold, Connotation Press, Short Story America, Frontier Tales, Texas Poetry Calendar, Poetry @ Round Top anthology, Tidal Basin Review, Red Dirt Review and Toucan Literary Magazine. He is Editor in Chief of Scribe, the online blog of the Writers’ League of Texas with over 6000 subscribers, and serves as Board President of the Writers’ League of Texas. He makes his home in rural central Texas near Temple with his trophy wife, Robin. His hobbies include poking wasp nests with short sticks and wandering aimlessly about.
Carlotta Eike Stankiewicz is an Austin-based writer and poet. She has performed in Austin’s Listen To Your Mother Show (2012) and recently read her piece “The Salon” at Austin’s One Page Salon on March 2, 2016. Her blog features both humorous rhyming verse and free verse. A single mom of two teenage daughters, she funds their activities by working as an advertising Creative Director, most recently at GSD&M, for national brands like Zales, AT&T, and John Deere. Haiku Austin is her first book, and features both her poetry and her photography.
It’s Bloomsday! Join us for a celebration of the life of writer James Joyce. Featuring live Irish music from Serge Laîné and Larry Rone (pictured below, from Poor Man’s Fortune), readings from Ulysses with an introduction by Joyce aficionado Peter Q, the moderator of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group, plus spirited discussion (audience participation welcome!)… and suitably Irish snacks, including Guinness cake!
Bloomsday, named for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, is observed around the world on June 16th, as this is the date during which the events of Ulysses are relived (16th June, 1904). Fun fact: Joyce apparently picked June 16th as it was the date of his first date with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.
Poor Man’s Fortune combines Breton, Cajun, Scottish, French & Irish music with original tunes and even more original ideas. This is World Music in a world of its own. Jigs, reels, polkas, 2-steps and waltzes. Breton plinns, an dros, ridées & gavottes. Made-up folk dances, songs of joy, sadness and murder… all featuring an assemblage of traditional and modern instruments, including dulcitare, wooden flute, accordion, pennywhistle, bombarde, bagpipes & hurdy-gurdy. Poor Man’s Fortune is at their best live on a stage in front of a crowd of any manner of music lover. Folkies, punks, rockers, mods, mockers, your teenage son’s friends, and your in-laws, no one is immune to a PMF stage show. Rock and roll energy with the precision of a string quartet.On June 26th Malvern Books will join the world in observation of International Day in Support of Victims of Torture with presentations and discussion. Come join Celia VanDeGraaf, Joe Bratcher, Christopher Brown, Taylor Pate, and Matthew Hodges as we celebrate the survival of victims of torture and wonder in dismay that this practice continues. A significant portion of the event will center on discussion of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.
The literary community at Malvern Books and the fine arts community at Bone Black Gallery are teaming up to welcome artist and author Kristina Hagman to Austin. Hagman will be presenting her new book, The Eternal Party, at Malvern Books on July 1st, 7pm. And at Bone Black Gallery on July 2nd, 7-9pm, there will be a reception and artist’s talk for 36 Views of Mt. Rainier, her suite of intricate woodblock prints.
In The Eternal Party Kristina recounts the multigenerational stories that led to huge stardom, not just once but twice, as both her grandmother Mary Martin (who played Peter in Peter Pan; Maria in The Sound of Music; and many more well-known roles) and her father, most famously known for two very different roles, first, as the comedic character of Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie and later as the villainous J.R. in Dallas. The book is as much a spiritual search for truth as it is an exposé on celebrity life. At her father’s side on his deathbed, Kristina heard her father keep repeating “forgive me” before he passed. Searching for clues as to what he meant, Kristina delves into her father’s past and details life within fame. Determined to tell her story, Hagman overcame struggles with dyslexia and ADHD to complete the book.
Hagman’s life path veered from that of her father and grandmother and she became a successful visual artist, having honed her skills in the arts community of Santa Fe. Hagman’s work has been displayed at the Pacific Asia Museum (Pasadena, California), Cullom Gallery (Seattle, WA), Antioch University (Seattle, WA), The Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Ketchum, Idaho, KIWA Kyoto International Woodprint Association, Kyoto, Japan and many others. Her work has also been included in more than 40 multi-artist exhibits since 1985. Her suite of woodblock prints, 36 Views of Mt. Rainier, is inspired by Hokusai’s collection Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, of which the piece The Great Wave is most well known. Hagman utilizes Mt. Rainier as a point of entry into exploring landscape from many angles. Works like Dawn embody a sense of calm and natural beauty, showing Mt. Rainier as one of America’s purple mountain majesties. In Rainier From Queen Anne we see the mountain as just one peak amongst many in a crowded city scape. Hagman produces these works using a blend of traditional and modern woodblock techniques.
Join us in celebrating the 90th birthday of esteemed poet, translator, educator, and editor Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth. We’ll be rejoicing with music, cake, poetry, friends, readings, and assorted literary shenanigans. Everyone is welcome for what is sure to be a wonderful afternoon.
Dr. Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth is an acclaimed poet, translator, educator, and editor. He was born in Mexico City in 1926, the son of an army officer of Spanish descent and a musician mother of German descent. In 1940 he left Mexico for Texas, making the United States his permanent home. He received a B.A. from the University of Texas in 1950 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973, and is professor emeritus of Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for more than thirty years. He has written numerous critical studies and has been published extensively in anthologies and magazines. He is the author of the poetry collections Looking for the Horse Latitudes (Host Publications) and Between Day and Night: New and Selected Poems, 1946-2010 (Tamu Press), and the translator of Natural Selection (Host Publications), the collected works of Uruguayan poet Enrique Fierro.
Join us in celebrating International Translation Day with a reading featuring renowned translators Kurt Heinzelman, Liliana Valenzuela, and Jamey Gambrell. And we’re also offering 20% off all books in translation on International Translation Day!
Poet, scholar, translator, and editor, Kurt Heinzelman is Editor-at-Large of Bat City Review and former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Texas. His latest book of poetry is Intimacies & Other Devices, and he is the translator of Jean Follain’s 1953 collection Territoires under the title Demarcations (Host Publications). He is also a member of the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature in Istanbul and Honorary Professor at Swansea University (Wales).
Liliana Valenzuela is an award-winning literary translator, poet, essayist, and journalist. Her bilingual poetry chapbook Codex of Journeys: Bendito camino was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2012. Valenzuela is the acclaimed Spanish language translator of works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Nina Marie Martínez, Ana Castillo, Dagoberto Gilb, Richard Rodríguez, Rudolfo Anaya, Cristina García, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many other writers. Her translation of Sandra Cisneros’ A House of My Own is due out Fall 2016. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and an inaugural fellow of CantoMundo, she works for ¡Ahora Sí!, the Spanish weekly of the Austin American-Statesman.
Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated works by Marina Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya, in addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice trilogy and his Day of the Oprichnik and, most recently, The Blizzard. This spring, the one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” premiered, featuring her translated surtitles of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry. Also this spring, Gambrell was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which recognizes “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.”
Opening day seems like it was only yesterday, but in fact Malvern Books turns THREE this week. And we’re celebrating our third anniversary in fine style, with music, readings, and cake. Come on down and join the party!
* Also worth noting: there will be 25 % off everything in the store all day! *
At 5pm, you’re invited to join us for a communal reading of the entirety of Frank O’Hara’s 1964 Lunch Poems. Come read a verse or two, and enjoy some birthday cake as your reward.
At 6pm, we’ll serve up some tasty snacks. Come eat and be merry!
And at 7pm, we’ll tap our feet to live music from ComeDrumForFun… and eat more cake!
Join us for a reading celebrating the launch of Short Stories by Texas Authors Vol. 2.
Texas Authors have once again allowed their creative minds to open up and expand the Universe in which they live with short stories that captures one’s emotions through the everlasting aspect of storytelling.
In this, the second volume of award-winning short stories, the reader is taken on a personal ride of growth and understanding, then through history both factual and fictional as they explore each side of two wars. Then fear grabs hold of you and shakes you with terror before unleashing giggles and out-right laughs. Those are just a few of the emotions one will experience as they read these seventeen short stories from all parts of Texas.
Here are the winners from this year’s contest:
Join us in celebrating the launch of L.E. Kinzie’s first poetry collection, Ignite. With readings from L.E. and Robin Bradford.
“Kinzie walks the fine line between modern American life and spirituality like a tightrope walker in heels. Her voice is funny, blunt, and sublime.”
—Joe McDermott, internationally awarded songwriter and performer
Ignite celebrates the beauty and sacredness of American life. Kirkus Reviews says Ignite is “a compilation of verse that’s popular in the best sense of the word.”
L.E. Kinzie lives in Austin, Texas, with a ridiculous and ever-changing menagerie of pets and her family. A recovering ex-lawyer, she is a passionate observer of humanity and the common threads that bind us all together—beauty, creation, and creating art.
Robin Bradford is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Mudfish Review and the Texas Poetry Calendar and is forthcoming in The Texas Observer and Friends Journal: A Quaker Magazine. Her literary honors include the Dobie Paisano Fellowship for Texas Writers, O. Henry Award, Texas Literature Grant and a Community Sabbatical Grant from the University of Texas Humanities Institute. A Zen lay teacher, Bradford works as communications director at Austin Community Foundation.
Join us for a poetry reading from the late Max Ritvo’s first collection, Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions). Max’s poetry will be read by Sarah Matthes.
When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.
Ritvo writes to his wife, ex-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.
Sarah Matthes is a poet, performer, and tall ship sailor from New Jersey. Her work can be found in Prodigal, the Feminist Utopia Project, the Bad Version, and His Majesty the Baby’s online zine. A graduate of Yale, she was a Frederick Mortimer Clapp Poetry fellow in 2013, and is a current fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Joe Doerr’s third book, Tocayo: New & Selected Poems & Songs (Shearsman Books). With a reading from Joe, and a performance of the song lyrics from the book from Joe and his band Churchwood.
“By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal—Joe Doerr’s Tocayo contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime.” —John Phillip Santos
“Disturbs all the codes.” —John Kinsella
Joe Doerr is a poet, musician, and essayist whose first collection, Order of the Ordinary, was published by Salt in 2003. His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in numerous journals including Fifth Wednesday, Notre Dame Review, PN Review, and Stand. Doerr is also the singer and lyricist for the acclaimed dystopic blues band, Churchwood, and Adjunct Professor of English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Mary.
Churchwood is an avant-blues quintet from Austin, Texas known for its poetry-driven lyrics, high-energy performances, and eccentric approach to making blues-based rock and roll.
Join us in celebrating the launch of E. Kristin Anderson’s new chapbook, We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). With readings from E. Kristin, K.D. Lovgren, and Abe Louise Young.
We’re Doing Witchcraft is a collection of feminist poetry about adolescence, the female body, the female experience, poems of protest and poems of selkies. The title poem is about school dress codes and how shoulders and knees obviously bewitch male students…
E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and author living in Austin, Texas. She is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me, an anthology based on the popular website and her next anthology, Hysteria: Writing the female body, is forthcoming from Sable Books. She is currently curating Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture for ELJ Publications. Kristin is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), She Witnesses (dancing girl press), and We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). Kristin recently took a position as Special Projects Manager for ELJ and is a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker.
K.D. Lovgren is the author of novels Photographic and Sea Change and the novella Book of Light and Shadows. Photographic has been a bestseller in Suspense on Amazon Canada. Both novels are Awesome Indies Approved, awarded a place on the list of quality independent fiction. Her poetry manuscript, The Archeology of Us, is under submission. Lovgren is the recipient of a Brown Foundation Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and a graduate of the oldest women’s college in the U.S., Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Lovgren resides in Austin, Texas.
Abe Louise Young is an independent writer, educator and social justice activist. Her work has won a Grolier Poetry Prize, the Hawai’i Review’s Nell Altizer Award, a Narrative Magazine Story Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in The Nation, WITNESS, New Letters, Feminist Wire and many other journals. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Heaven to Me (Headmistress Press) and Ammonite (Magnolia Press Collective). A lifelong social justice advocate, she’s also the author/editor of numerous guides, including Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBTQ Students; Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers; and an archive of oral histories with Hurricane Katrina survivors, Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History Project. Young earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and holds a BA from Smith College.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Valerie Hsiung’s third full-length poetry collection, efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books). Joining Hsiung as co-headlining readers for the evening will be Lisa Olstein, Dalton Day, and Taisia Kitaiskaia.
Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books, 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (O Balthazar Press, 2013). Her writing can be found in many places such as American Letters & Commentary, Cosmonauts Avenue, Denver Quarterly, New Delta Review, PEN Poetry Series, Prelude, RealPoetik, and VOLT, among elsewhere. She currently serves as an editor for Poor Claudia.
Lisa Olstein is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). A new book, Late Empire, is forthcoming in 2017. A winner of the Essay Press Prize, her chapbook, The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to those of Whales is a Family Resemblance was released this fall. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dalton Day is an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin and the author of two collections of poetry, Actual Cloud and Exit, Pursued, as well as several chapbooks, including To Breathe I’m Too Thin. His poems have been featured in Hobart, PANK, Everyday Genius, and Shabby Doll House, among others. He has a dog named Dot, who is the opposite of the crushing emotional weight that comes with being alive.
Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of Literary Witches, a collaboration with illustrator Katy Horan (Seal Press 2017). She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Fence.
Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of Dos Gatos Press’ most recent anthology, Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, edited by Scott Wiggerman and Cindy Huyser with a foreword by Dr. Carmen Tafolla. With readings from Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser, Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta, Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, Barbara Randals Gregg, and Scott Wiggerman.
This reading will feature poets from Austin and across the state reading their own work and others’ from this acclaimed anthology. The second in a series of anthologies of poetry of the Southwest by Albuquerque-based Dos Gatos Press, Bearing the Mask presents a diverse collection of personae from before European contact to the present, from the historical to the mythical, and from the famous to the obscure, woven together to form a vibrant, complex history.
About Bearing the Mask:
To quote from the foreword by Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla, “The range of voices here is as beautiful and translucent as a rainbow. From Cochise to Calamity Jane, Navaho Code Talkers to Japanese internees, Devil Girl and Old Man Gloom, slaves and stunt pilots, Paiutes and migrant mothers, Annie Oakley and Georgia O’Keeffe, security officers and French tourists, Gregorio Cortez, La Llorona, and Cynthia Ann Parker—all come to life here, speak their own truths and their own sacred space in these poems.”
Bearing the Mask offers rich perspectives on life in the Southwest, garnering praise in reader reviews that call it “fascinating” and “an amazing book for poetry and history lovers.”
Photo, L-R: Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser
Anjela Villarreal Ratliff’s poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga; The Enigmatist; Blue Hole; Texas Poetry Calendar; di-vêrsé-city; Australian Latino Press; Boundless 2016; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems; Ribbons Anthology; and forthcoming in Chachalaca Review; Pilgrimage Magazine; and The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop. Anjela is also a writing workshop presenter for youth and adults. A native Tejana, she was raised in southern California, but has resided in Austin since 1990.
C. Samuel Rees is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland’s writing program. He has been published in Fairy Tale Review, JMWW, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and in the Texas Poetry Calendar. He lives in Austin, Texas where he writes poetry, fiction, and works as a high school teacher.
Charlotte Renk‘s poetry has appeared in journals such as Kalliope, Concho River Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Southwest Review, and Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, as well as in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas, and Her Texas. She has also published three books of poetry— These Holy Hungers: Secret Yearnings from an Empty Cup, Solidago: An Altar to Weeds, and The Tenderest Petal Hears (co-winner, 2014 Blue Horse Press Chapbook Award).
Christa Pandey has been widely published since she moved to Austin. As German immigrant herself she became interested in the immigration saga of the 19th century. Her poems are collected in three chapbooks (Southern Seasons, Maya, and Hummingbird Wings), while individual poems can be found in the Texas Poetry Calendar, the Poetry@Round Top Anthology, Naugatuck River Review and online at Silver Birch Press.
Cindy Huyser has worked with Dos Gatos Press as an editor since 2008. Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was named co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook contest. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, The Nassau Review, Untameable City, and the Texas Poetry Calendar, which she co-edited from 2009 – 2014.
Photo, L-R: Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta
Cyra S. Dumitru is a teacher of poetry writing, writing as healing and of college composition, and is certified in Poetic Medicine through The Institute of Poetic Medicine. She facilitates individual and small group healing through writing circles in a variety of community settings. She has three book-length collections of her poems: What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, and remains.
Gloria Amescua, a CantoMundo fellow and Hedgebrook alumna, is the author of two chapbooks, Windchimes and What Remains. Amescua has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including di-verse-city, Kweli Journal, the Texas Poetry Calendar, The Acentos Review, Toe Good Poetry, Pilgrimage Magazine, and Elsewhere Lit. She has also received the Austin Poetry Society Award and the Christina Sergeyenvna Award.
Gordon Magill is a journalist, writing teacher, exhibit writer, freelancer, and poet. He has worked at The Washington Evening Star and Washington Post in Washington DC, taught writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, as well as in public high school, and has written about two hundred published articles and short stories. Recently Gordon’s poetry has been published in The Enigmatist and Blue Hole.
Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s recent poems appear in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets, Lifting the Sky, Texas Poetry Calendar, and in her chapbook Water Signs. Katherine co-directs the Poetry at Round Top festival, is a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and professor and chair of English at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, TX.
Leticia Urieta is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Texas State University, where she is a graduate teaching assistant and the blog editor for Front Porch Journal. She is currently working as an educator in the community with a focus on equity in the pedagogy of writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, St. Sucia Zine and BorderSenses. Leticia lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two dogs. She is currently at work on a short story collection and her first novel about the role of Mexican soldaderas in Texas’ war with Mexico.
Photo, L-R: Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell
Lucy Griffith is a poet and essayist who lives on a ranch along the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. She is a Certified Master Naturalist as well as a licensed psychologist.
She is a member of the Texas Writer’s League and has been published monthly in The Texas Star and various psychology journals. Her muse is a tractor named Ruby and a good day is one spent outside.
Lyman Grant teaches creative writing, English, and humanities at Austin Community College. He is married and the proud father of three sons. A poet since high school, he has a big pile of poems, some of them collected in four books and one chapbook. The most recent is Last Work: A Meditation on the Final Paintings of Neal Adams.
Lynn Reynolds wrote many poems while a member of the Houston Poetry Society, the Texas Poetry Society and Poets, Ink. She read at the 2012 Houston Poetry Fest and has now been published in From Hide and Horn: A Sesquicentennial Anthology of Texas Poets, the Texas Poetry Calendar, and Untameable City.
Sandi Stromberg was guest editor of Mutabilis Press’ latest poetry anthology, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and Colere, among others, as well as in the anthologies TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, and Improbable Worlds, Crossing Lines, Goodbye, Mexico, Civilized Beasts, and is upcoming in Texas Weather Anthology. She has been a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eight times.
Vanessa Zimmer-Powell was the winner of a Rick Steves Haiku Award, and was a poetry award winner at the 2013 Austin International Poetry Fest. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Weekly Avocet, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Untameable City, the Texas Poetry Calendar, San Pedro River Review, The Chaffey Review, and Copperfield Review.
Photo, L-R: Barbara Randals Gregg, Scott Wiggerman
Barbara Randals Gregg has poetry in di-verse-city, The Enigmatist, Blue Hole, the Austin Poetry Society’s Best Austin Poetry anthology, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, and several editions of Texas Poetry Calendar. She currently serves as Austin Poetry Society President.
Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and an editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky, Wingbeats II, and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems. Recent poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Red Earth Review, Pinyon Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the anthologies This Assignment Is So Gay, Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s, and The Great Gatsby Anthology. He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We’re delighted to be hosting a reading to celebrate the launch of Small Packages, the debut anthology of stories, poetry and prose from Austin’s Writers Workshop. Readers include poets Kara Bell, Laurie Cosbey and A.M. Lewin, novelist Ron Seybold, plus Holly Lorka, Karen Hoffman, Merry Klonower, Hadley Hill, and Emily Weaver.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Mike Lala’s Exit Theater, which won the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry. With readings from Mike Lala and Rebecca Liu.
Selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Exit Theater casts classical elegy, with dazzling formal innovation, into a staggering work of contemporary, political polyphony. Through monologues, performance scripts, and poems of exquisite prosody, Mike Lala examines the human figure—as subject and object, enemy and ally—in the context of a progressively defigured and hostile world. Catullus, Shakespeare, Cy Twombly, and Lydia Delectorskaya echo across engagements with Israeli generals, accused terrorists, State Department employees, nuclear scientists, Saturday Night Live actors, war criminals, malware, and a host of mythic, literary, and half-extant spectral characters. Amid the cacophony, Lala implicates every actor, including himself, in a web of shared culpability vis-à-vis consumerism, representation, speaking, writing, and making art against the backdrop of the endless, open wars of a post–Cold War, post-2001 era. Exit Theater is a debut of and against its time—a book about war, art, and what it means to make art in a time of war.
This is a remarkable book—sprawling, generous, angry, delicate. Through borrowed language and staged dialogues, Exit Theater asks how individual experiences of violence combine with myth to create the collective present, where we peer out from the ‘gun cabinet.’ A gun cabinet is a scary place from which to act as friend, to act as lover, to talk to family ghosts. Lala’s book tears open the velvet cushioning. —Cathy Wagner
Mike Lala (b. 1987, Lubbock, TX) is a poet who works with text, recorded sound, and, occasionally, images. His first book, Exit Theater, was selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Current work can be found in Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Awl, and VOLT, as well as a number of chapbooks, most recently In the Gun Cabinet (TAR 2016) and Twenty-Four Exits (Present Tense Pamphlets 2016). He lives in New York. (Author photo credit: Kate Enman.)
Rebecca Liu is the recipient of fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers and the Stadler Center for Poetry. Her recent poems can be found in Boston Review, VOLT, Web Conjunctions, The Awl, Phantom Limb and Gulf Coast.
Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler, featuring readings by Annie Harnett, David Jewell, David Thornberry, Larry Thoren, Mark Smith, and Master of Ceremonies W. Joe Hoppe.
Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe, who will be reading tonight, describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”
On January 15th poets across the country will gather to voice their fears and concerns about a Trump Presidency. Join us at Malvern Books for the Austin event, organized by Justin Booth in association with the Chicon Street Poets. Nationwide, Poets Protest Against Trump is organized by Alan Kaufman, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Michael Rothernberg, co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets For Change.
Join us in celebrating the launch of local poetry press INF Press. Poets Jenna Martin Opperman and Andrea Eames will be reading from their newly released poetry collections, the initial offerings of INF Press.
Jenna Martin Opperman has a BA in English Literature from The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Despite being published in a wide variety of poetry journals and magazines, she prefers the thrill and terror of performing before a live audience. She works and plays with the printed word every day as an English teacher, as the owner of Red Planet Audiobooks, and as the co-founder of INF Press. Her poetry comes from a place of ferocity, of playfulness, of emotional urgency, and of hope. She loves whisky, revelation, and naps.
Praise for Shattering is Gradual by Jenna Martin Opperman:
This highly-polished, cerebral collection spans years of writing, and is an achievement both elegant and emotional. Love, heartbreak and self-realization are major themes, described with wry, often funny, always balanced poignancy.
Andrea Eames is a poet and novelist living in Austin after eight years in New Zealand and seventeen in Zimbabwe. She has released two critically acclaimed novels so far, both published by Harvill Secker (an imprint of Penguin Random House UK) and set in Zimbabwe: The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011) and The White Shadow (2012). The White Shadow was shortlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first poetry collection, The Making of Stones, was released in March 2016 and her second, New Monsters, was released in February 2017. Andrea aims to be vulnerable, vivid, and honest in her poetry and prose.
Praise for New Monsters by Andrea Eames:
New Monsters is not for the timid. A study in the feminine as much as the poet, Eames’ new collection is fearless, revealing women in our full, unfettered beauty. Within these pages, we are ravenous and angry, raw and polished, simultaneously ourselves and our search for something larger—much like the collection itself.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Michael Anania’s poetry collection, Continuous Showings.
With Anania’s familiar, quick movement from perception to the precise but often kinetic image and his extraordinary musicality, Continuous Showings explores a wide range of continuities, from the persistence of tribal culture and language in Mexico to the experience of a fifties movie with Sinatra and Doris Day, from Newton’s alchemical encounter with the New World to the coincidence of science and Dadaism in Paris in 1922, from lute music to jazz. The collection’s final section, the award-winning “Omaha Appendices,” returns to the setting of Anania’s early poetry and fiction to examine the tragicomedy of Italian-American life in the Midwest.
Michael Anania is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. His published work includes twelve collections of poetry, among them Selected Poems (l994), In Natural Light (1999) and Heat Lines (2006). His work is widely anthologized and has been translated into Italian, German, French, Spanish and Czech. He has also published a novel, The Red Menace, and a collection of essays, In Plain Sight. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the Charles Angoff Award and the Aniello Lauri Award for poems in this collection.
Anania was poetry editor of Audit, a quarterly, founder and co-editor of Audit/Poetry, poetry and literary editor of The Swallow Press, poetry editor of Partisan Review and a contributing editor to Tri-Quarterly and has served as an advisory editor to a number of other magazines and presses. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the faculty in writing at Northwestern University. He also taught at SUNY at Buffalo and the University of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas, and on Lake Michigan.
Join us in celebrating the launch of new books from poets Andrew Wessels, James Meetze, and Kelli Anne Noftle, with readings from Andrew, James, and Kelli, plus special guest John Fry. Andrew will be reading from A Turkish Dictionary; James will read from Phantom Hour; and Kelli will read from Adam Cannot Be Adam.
Andrew Wessels currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Istanbul, where he teaches at Koç University. He has previously lived in Houston, Cambridge, and Las Vegas. He has held fellowships from Poets & Writers and the Black Mountain Institute. His first book is A Turkish Dictionary from 1913 Press. Semi Circle, a chapbook of his translations of the Turkish poet Nurduran Duman, was published by Goodmorning Menagerie in 2016. His poems and translations can be found in VOLT, Witness, Tammy Journal, Faultline, and Colorado Review, among others. He is the NOS Series editor at Les Figues Press and a founding editor of The Offending Adam.
James Meetze [Metz] is the author of three books, including Phantom Hour and Dayglo, which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, both published by Ahsahta Press. He is editor, with Simon Pettet, of Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010). James lives in San Diego, where he is a professor of creative writing and film studies at Ashford University.
Kelli Anne Noftle is a poet, musician, and business manager who currently lives in San Diego with her husband and their 50-year-old Sulcata tortoise, Bong Rip. Her first collection of poems, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2010 Omnidawn Book Prize. Her new book of poems, Adam Cannot Be Adam, is now out from Omnidawn Publishing.
John Fry is the author of the chapbook silt will swirl (NewBorder, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, West Branch, Water~Stone Review, and The Laurel Review, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Texas State University. He serves as a poetry editor for Newfound Journal, and he is an assistant instructor and PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Schadenfreude, A Love Story by Rebecca Schuman. We’ll enjoy readings from Rebecca and Susan Signe Morrison.
Schadenfreude is the story of a teenage Jewish intellectual who falls in love—in love with a boy (who breaks her heart), a language (that’s nearly impossible to master), a culture (that’s nihilistic, but punctual), and a landscape (that’s breathtaking when there’s not a wall in the way). At once a snapshot of a young woman finding herself, and a country slowly starting to stitch itself back together after nearly a century of war (both hot and cold), Schadenfreude, A Love Story is an exhilarating, hilarious, and yes, maybe even heartfelt memoir proving that sometimes the truest loves play hard to get.
Rebecca Schuman is a St. Louis-based writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Awl, The Hairpin, Slate, the Atlantic, and other publications. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from The New School and a PhD in German from the University of California-Irvine. SCHADENFREUDE, A LOVE STORY is her first work of commercial nonfiction.
Living in Austin, Texas and Professor of English at Texas State University, Susan Signe Morrison lived in Germany during the 1980s and taught in the former East Germany. Her Stasi file has some unusual (and false) assertions. She will read selections from her published works on historical and legendary Germanic women.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Tomás Q. Morín’s new poetry collection, Patient Zero (Copper Canyon Press). With readings from Tomás and Elena Passarello.
Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero is full of life and its undeniable hungers. Claws, fins, mouths, and feathers populate a fanciful world: a man in a crowded market becomes a tree of butterflies, a mountain gives a feline yawn, grocery bags contain “milk for bones — salt for blood.” Meanwhile at the edge of the fantastic, realism beckons: the buzzard stalks the tortoise, heartbreak sickens the living, and each beginning contains an end.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Elena Passarello is the author of two collections of essays, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses. Her essays on performance, pop, culture, and the natural world have recently appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award in nonfiction, she teaches at Oregon State University.
After 100 days the poets of Austin stand up and resist unjust practices and policies. The format will be fast, as we’d love to hear from many perspectives in this safe place reading. Outlaw Poet Justin Booth will host some of Austin’s best including W. Joe Hoppe, Joe Brundidge, Richard Acevado, Favian Harper, David Julian, Nikki Bruns, Rebecca Raphael, Stephany Morrissey, Brett Reeves, and Lyman Grant.
Join us in celebrating the release of the Spring 2017 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review, which showcases poetry, prose, and artworks by students. During the event, students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.
Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!
Readers include Ignacio Carvajal, Nicolas Emilfork, and Jim Trainer, and there will be music from Chulita Vinyl Club.
Come celebrate the release of Analecta 43! We’ll be distributing copies of the journal, chatting about literature and art, eating snacks, and listening to some of the contributors read their work.
Join Hothouse Literary Journal for a reading from its spring publication. There will be copies of the free journal to pick up, a reading from some of the published writers, light refreshments, and conversation. Bring your friends! All are welcome.
Hothouse Literary Journal is the official journal for the UT English Department. They publish poetry, nonfiction, and fiction stories from multiple genres every year.
Join us for the launch of Chen Chen’s debut poetry collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. With readings from Chen Chen, Jennifer Whalen, Tomás Morin, and Katelin Kelly.
What does Millennial poetry look like? One answer might be this wild debut from Chen Chen. He seems to run at the mouth, free-associating wildly, switching between lingo and ‘higher’ forms of diction. Nothing’s out of bounds or off limits, no culture too ‘pop’ to find its place in poetry . . . nor anything too silly to point the way toward serious aims. And yet this is a deeply serious and moving book about Chinese-American experience, young love, poetry, family, and the family one makes amongst friends. —NPR Books
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and out now from BOA Editions. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in publications such as Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Poetry. He has been featured on the PBS Newshour and Out.com. A Kundiman and Lambda Literary fellow, he is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
Jennifer Whalen’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, Fugue, New South, Grist, and elsewhere. She was the 2015-2016 L.D. & LaVerne Harrell Clark House writer-in-residence at Texas State University. Residing in San Marcos, Texas, she currently teaches college writing.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Katelin Kelly was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She migrated to Austin three years ago where she earned her MFA in Poetry at The New Writers Project. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Katelin serves as the Managing Editor for Bat City Review. Her work can be found in Sonora Review, Misadventures Magazine, Wounwapi Literary Journal, and Narrative.
This all-women reading features writers from the Revolution Writing Workshop led by Abe Louise Young. Join us for poetry and prose about mothering, queer and straight parenting, being mothered and unmothered, sex, Mother Earth, and more! Readers include: Rebecca Whitehurst, Kandice Farmer, Robin Bradford, Abe Louise Young, Marcela Contreras, Angeliska Polachek, and Jamie Harris.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Intent (published by Hedgehog & Fox, an imprint of Warner Literary Group), the debut poetry collection from Austin-based actor and writer Christia Madacsi Hoffman. With readings from Christia, Erica Parfit, Joe Brundidge, and Margaret Burns.
Inspired by a friend’s daily photography series, Christia Madacsi Hoffman set an intention to write a minimum of two lines of verse per day for 365 days. Four years and thousands of lines later, the result is her debut collection of poetry, Intent. Throughout, Hoffman reveals an accessible and insightful poetic voice as she explores the universal themes of place, beauty, youth and family. Her moving reflections remind us there is depth in our everyday experiences and significance in our intentions.
Christia Madacsi Hoffman grew up along the banks of the Mystic River in Mystic, Connecticut. A longtime Austin, Texas resident, Hoffman’s work has appeared in the Texas Observer and the annual anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival. Through her company, CenterLight Media, Hoffman works as a marketing and editorial writer, graphic designer and actor. Her early career adventures included antique furniture restoration and leading treks in the high Himalaya.
As the daughter of a travel writer, Erica Parfit (above left) learned to love the way words fit together. With the loss of her mother at a young age, she also came to understand the importance of self-expression through writing and music. Following a hiatus in which she became a mom to two boys, Erica returned to the written word as a songwriter, poet, and memoirist. She credits writing with allowing her to maintain a sense of humor and perspective in this wild and wonderful world.
Joe Brundidge (above center) is an author, host, and public speaker living in Austin, Texas. He has hosted a number of open mic events for almost 20 years, including Spoken & Heard at Kick Butt Coffee, an event he curates. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015.
Margaret Burns (above right) has an MA in Creative Writing from UT and has been writing short fiction and rapping about her life to unsuspecting children and audiences for a while now. Margaret is a midwife, a yoga teacher, and a mother. Her life mission includes queso.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Jessica Reisman’s new novel, Substrate Phantoms.
Substrate Phantoms presents immemorial human acts in variations as strange as any 21st-century reader could imagine, but always in contexts emotionally resonant. I think it an out-and-out breakthrough, with mystical and sociological roots trailing back to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Indeed, true aficionados of humane hard SF will applaud Ms. Reisman for bequeathing them this beautiful tale of a heretofore uncreated tomorrow. —Michael Bishop, author of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
Jessica Reisman’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, among them the World Fantasy Award-nominated Cross Plains Universe. Her story “Threads” won the South East Science Fiction Achievement award. Her far future science fiction adventure SUBSTRATE PHANTOMS, from Resurrection House Books, is out in May 2017 and her story “Bourbon, Sugar, Grace” will appear on Tor.com in June 2017.
Please join us for a celebratory reading by the writers of S. Kirk Walsh’s nine-month fiction workshop (Sept-June). Short excerpts from novels and short stories will be read.
Participating writers include Dena Afrasiabi, Nicole Beckley, Candace Buford, Elena Carey, Matt Clements, Megan Coxe, Jack Kaulfus, Matt Holmes, Katherine Moore, Alejandro Puyana, Victoria Rossi, Karen Valby, Julie Wernersbach, James Young, and Stefani Zellmer. This talented group of writers features published fiction and nonfiction writers, book critics, and MFA graduates. For the past nine months, they have participated in an intensive fiction workshop, drafting and revising novels and short stories throughout the year. Please join us in celebrating their inspiring work and distinctive voices with this end-of-the-workshop reading. Refreshments and sweets will be served.
Join us in celebrating the launch of The Adventures of Juice Box and Shame, the next installment in Liv Hadden’s The Shamed Series—and this new release features comic book illustrations by St. Louis artist Mo Malone. This event will also feature live music from Lexi and the Bleached Roses.
Li Nguyen, aka Juice Box, has never really had a friend. That is, until he meets the ultra cool, super mysterious Shame. Though Juice Box feels certain this is his new BFF, Shame’s dark past and nefarious entanglements get them both into serious, life-threatening trouble. It doesn’t help that Shame inadvertently pissed off one of the baddest crime bosses in Baltimore, Anna Nguyen (aka Laoban), who also happens to be Juice Box’s cousin. Shame stirred up trouble with a rival game, putting Anna and her crew in a precarious situation. Torn between his love for Anna and his new, exciting friendship with Shame, Juice Box must choose where his loyalties lie.
Liv Hadden (above left) has her roots in Burlington, Vermont and currently resides in Georgetown, Texas with her partner and two dogs, Madison and Samuel, where she is an active member of Writer’s League of Texas. Her 2016 release In the Mind of Revenge received high praise from Blue Ink Reviews, Writer’s Digest, Kirkus Reviews, indieBRAG and five stars from Foreword Clarion Review. Incredibly inspired by artistic expression, Hadden immerses herself in creative endeavors on a daily basis. She finds great joy in getting lost in writing and seeing others fully express themselves through their greatest artistic passions.
Mo Malone has been making art since she was a kid. Offered a tattoo apprenticeship while obtaining a B.F.A. in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Malone briefly diverted from tattooing to be an elementary and middle school teacher, an experience she greatly enjoyed, but ultimately came back to her artistic roots. She has tattooed at Rick’s Tattoo in Arlington, Virginia (where she got her start), Iron Age Studio in St. Louis, Missouri and Triple Crown Tattoo in Austin, Texas where she met Hadden. A lover of travel, her craft has taken her all over the world, to include a dozens of tattoo conferences spanning from New York to Moscow. You can now find Malone back in St. Louis at Ragtime Tattoo. She has recently joined Evil Prints to expand into screen-printing, and when she’s not working her magic in the art world, you can find her feeding her adventurous spirit BMXing at her local skate park or wandering the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Joe Giordano’s second novel, Appointment with ISIL, An Anthony Provati Thriller. Joe will be joined by author Walt Gragg, who will be reading from his recently released novel The Red Line.
Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn. He and his wife, Jane, have lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands. They now live in Texas with their shih tzu, Sophia. Joe’s stories have appeared in more than one-hundred magazines including The Monarch Review, The Saturday Evening Post, decomP, The Summerset Review, and Shenandoah. His novel, Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story, was published by Harvard Square Editions in October 2015. His second novel, Appointment with ISIL, An Anthony Provati Thriller, will be published by HSE on June 15, 2017.
Walt Gragg lives in the Austin, Texas area with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He is a retired attorney. Prior to law school, he spent a number of years in the military. His time with the Army involved many interesting assignments including three years in the middle of the Cold War at United States European Command Headquarters in Germany where the idea for The Red Line took shape. In this assignment he was privy to many of the elements of the actual American plan in place at the time for the conduct of the defense of Germany. While there, he also participated in a number of war games that became the basis for many of the novel’s events.
Join us in celebrating the launch of the debut issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review, which features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities. Several poets and writers will read excerpts of their work from this debut edition, including Marilyn Duncan, Zoë Faye Stindt, Howard Hatfield, Carol Moczygemba, Jennifer Preiss, Benjamin Pehr, Elijah Allred, Charles Darnell, and Griselda Castillo. Editors from the journal will also share their favorite pieces and conduct a Q & A.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Dylan Krieger’s Giving Godhead (Delete Press). With readings from Dylan, Cindy Huyser, Debangana Banerjeem, and Vincent Cellucci.
Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana. She lives in the back of a little brick house with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great, sings harmonies incessantly to any song she hears, and sunlights as a trade mag editor. She earned her BA in English and philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2012 and her MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University in 2015. She is the author of Giving Godhead and dreamland trash (Saint Julian Press, forthcoming). Her more recent projects include an irreverent reimagining of philosophical thought experiments and an autobiographical meditation on the tenets of the Church of Euthanasia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several print and online literary journals, including Seneca Review, Midwest Review, Quarterly West, Xavier Review, Phoebe, So and So, Tenderloin, Coup d’Etat, and Maintenant.
Cindy Huyser’s chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was named co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook contest. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net award and the Pushcart Prize, and has recently appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, San Pedro River Review, Red River Review, The Enigmatist, Watermelon Isotope, and in Bearing The Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press), which she edited with Scott Wiggerman of Dos Gatos Press.
Debangana Banerjee was born and raised in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India and lived there until she came to Baton Rouge in 2006. She received her second Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from Louisiana State University in August 2010. There, she worked with poet Vincent Cellucci, who wrote An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). Come back river, a bilingual Bengali-English translation, is a chapbook collaboration of the two available from Finishing Line Press. They are working on completing a full-length book of translations this summer and will be reading some of their new work.
Join us for a reading and discussion about women writing hard science Sci-Fi and Fantasy, featuring Nancy Smith and Christy Esmahan, facilitated by Patrice Sarath.
Nancy Smith is a writer of two published novels, eighteen screenplays, and twenty-two short stories. She is a filmmaker, script analyst, script supervisor as well as owner of First Look Script Analysis, operating since December 2005 and First Look Publishing operating since 2016.
Christy Esmahan is an award-winning novelist who is passionate about the environment. Her novels are primarily about climate change, the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans and social justice. Esmahan began her career as a scientist, earning her BA in Microbiology at Miami University and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Universidad de Leon, Spain. She lived in Houston for sixteen years and moved to Austin about two years ago. When she’s not writing, she works as a professional translator and she loves to go birding with her husband.
Patrice Sarath is the author of the Gordath Wood fantasy series (Gordath Wood, Red Gold Bridge, and The Crow God’s Girl), the historical romance The Unexpected Miss Bennet, and several science fiction short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Claude Lalumière’s fourth book, Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment, a work of speculative fiction that Portal/World SF Blog called “bizarre, fascinating, hilarious.”
Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state, inspired in part by Venice, The Arabian Nights, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. It is divided in three sections. The first, “The Lure of Vermilion,” describes the impact of Venera’s lure on various characters. The second section, “Adventures in Times Past,” ranges from the Roman Empire’s invasion of Venera and intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance to a tale of Salvador Dalí’s ties to Venera and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade’s relationship to Venera. The final section, “The Secret Histories of Magus Amore,” returns to the present to resolve the mysteries of Venera.
Claude Lalumière is the author of three previous books: Objects of Worship (CZP 2009), The Door to Lost Pages (CZP 2011), and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes (Infinity Plus 2013). He has edited or co-edited 14 anthologies in various genres. Originally from Montreal, he’s currently headquartered in Ottawa.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Ching-In Chen’s new poetry collection, recombinant. With readings from Ching-In Chen, mónica teresa ortiz, and Jesus Valles.
Ching-In Chen’s recombinant is an innovative and powerful collection about genealogy, migration, survival, gender, memory, and ecology. The poems unearth and recombine fragments from museum artifacts, laws, census data, and historical archives with lyric reflections and open-heart composition strategies. By the end, you will feel haunted by the ghosts and ancestors who have continued their journey in the vessel of the poet’s tongue. —Craig Santos Perez
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press; AK Press) and Here is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). A Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole and Callaloo Fellow, they are part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. A senior editor of The Conversant, they serve on the Executive Board of Thinking Its Presence: Race, Advocacy, and Solidarity in the Arts. They are an Assistant Professor in Poetry at Sam Houston State University and poetry editor of the Texas Review.
mónica teresa ortiz was born and raised in Texas. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Borderlands, the Texas Observer, Black Girl Dangerous, and elsewhere. A two-time Andres Montoya Letras Latinas Poetry Prize finalist, ortiz is the poetry editor for Raspa Magazine, a queer Latino literary art journal.
Jesus I. Valles is a queer, Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer based in Austin, Texas. Jesus has been yelling about things for over a decade and doesn’t see that ending any time soon. Jesus was a finalist for the Write Bloody 2016 poetry contest and will soon be featured in The Shade journal. As a writer and storyteller, Jesus has presented work at Greetings, From Queer Mountain!, The Megaphone Show, The Encyclopedia Show, and The Austin Storytelling Slam. As an actor, Jesus works with multiple companies including Teatro Vivo, Lucky Chaos Theatre, and Scottish Rite Theater, and The Vortex (where they are a proud company member). Jesus is continuing work on a poetry manuscript tentatively called UnDocuments, which will have its first reading and workshop at The Vortex in September of 2017.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of Martin Perlman’s debut novel, Thinks Out Loud.
It all started as a personal blog. For more than a year, Martin Perlman published his musings two or three times a week online; social commentary, cultural references, and the like. Then it became something more. The result is the . . . debut novel, Thinks Out Loud, a story that follows a burned-out blogger who washes up in the South Pacific, and a group of characters at odds with a high-tech CEO with murky intentions. —from Queen Anne & Magnolia News
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Perlman has spent his adult life out West in California, Colorado, and Washington. Influences on his psyche include repeated viewings of Rocky and Bullwinkle, repeated listenings to Tom Lehrer and Firesign Theatre, and repeated readings of the collected works of James Thurber, J. G. Ballard, and Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan). (BTW Martin’s mother was born in Dallas, and her favorite song was “Yellow Rose of Texas.”) In an age of specialists, he considers himself to be one of the last of the generalists. Along the Way, Martin has been a pipe and tobacco salesclerk, a ski lift operator, a dishwasher at an Italian vegetarian restaurant, a bay leaf harvester, bookstore clerk, freshman English instructor, proofreader and stock boy for an independent publisher, harmonica player for a rock band, the only dues-paying member of an improv group, freelance writer, staffer for a weekly news and entertainment magazine, short story and humor writer, a director of communications at a health foundation, and a communications specialist at a university. (And, until funding ran out, a web content writer for a high-tech start-up that floundered during the dot com-collapse.) He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Lane, and daughter, Lila.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Meghan Lamb’s novel Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace). With readings from Meghan, J.Scott Brownlee, and Bridget Brewer (left to right, below). Meghan’s portion of the reading will incorporate visuals by Jason Pappariella.
A hybrid of fabulist and minimalist fiction, Silk Flowers details a woman’s mysterious illness from the dual perspectives of wife and husband, gesturing to issues of disability and female representation, troubling the language that surrounds cultural narratives of sickness and recovery.
Meghan Lamb is the recipient of an MFA in Fiction from Washington University and the 2018 Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing. She is the author of the novel Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017), the poetry chapbook Letter to Theresa (dancing girl press, 2016), and the novella Sacramento (Solar Luxuriance, 2014). Her work has been featured in DIAGRAM, Passages North, Redivider, The Collagist, Nat. Brut, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere.
Bridget Brewer is a writer, illustrator, educator, and performer based out of Austin, TX. The recipient of the Frances Mason Harris Book Prize and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, she is the author of the chapbook Little Animal (Awst Press), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Threadcount, DREGINALD, Black Sun Lit, and Ink Brick, among others. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
J. Scott Brownlee is the author of Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize, 2016 Bob Rush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a finalist for the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award. His chapbooks have received the 2013 Button Poetry Prize, the 2014 Robert Phillips Prize, and 2015 Tree Light Books Prize, and his poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He teaches for Brooklyn Poets as a core faculty member and is a founding member of The Localists.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Prudence Arceneaux’s new chapbook, Dirt.
From the first word of this collection, “Listen,” to the last lines, “eyes begging me/ to act right just once this time,” Dirt compels by rendering what lingers and builds in the gritty, earth-bound spaces between us. Again and again, Arceneaux moves between the soil and the sky with deft, musical phrasing, asking us to pause with her in the moments of almost connection, of almost release, of almost fully living before our last breaths. —Charlotte Gullick, author of By Way of Water
C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who has taught English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX, since 1998. She earned a BA in English/ Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, but even before finishing the degree realized “there’s no place like home.” Upon her return to Texas, she began work on an MFA in Creative Writing, which she received from the University- formerly-known-as-Southwest- Texas-State in 1998. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, New Texas, Clark Street Review, Hazmat Review and Inkwell.
Join us in celebrating the launch of acclaimed poet Zachary Schomburg’s debut novel, Mammother. With readings from Zachary, Molly Schulman, and Josh Denslow.
Praise for Mammother:
“Like the younger sibling of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, but boxier and more etched on the page. And, Schomburg’s book is still utterly its own thing, strange and wondrous.” —Aimee Bender
The people of Pie Time are suffering from God’s Finger, a mysterious plague that leaves some thing inside a death hole in each victim’s chest. Mano Medium, a grief-stricken young cigarette-factory worker in love, quits the factory to work double-time as Pie Time’s replacement barber and butcher, and holds the things found in the holes of the newly dead. However, as more people die, the bigger Mano becomes. With a large cast of characters, each struggling with their own tangled relationships to death, money, and love, Mammother is a fabulist tale of holding on and letting go in a rapidly growing world.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of four books of poetry, and is the publisher of Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, OR.
Molly Schulman is a writer and an editor. She was born in California; she grew up in New York; she lived in Georgia for a nice while; now she lives in Texas. After receiving her B.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, she worked in publishing as an in-house editor at The Friedrich Agency where she worked with authors such as Elizabeth Strout, Jane Smiley, and Ruth Ozeki. In October 2013, she left the agency to pursue her own writing, performing, and professional freelance editing and author consultation services. As an independent editor, she’s worked with authors such as Imbolo Mbue, Heather Barbieri, and Will Heinrich. She has taught writing and publishing workshops in Austin, TX at The Writing Barn and TOMS Roasting CO., and in NYC, during the Brooklyn Book Festival. In 2017, she will be the guest author and instructor at L’avventura Writing Residency at Villa Cantoni, in the Friuli region of Northeast Italy. Molly debuted her one woman show, a poetry-based storytelling performance called One of Six—a story about growing up with many siblings, in many houses—at the City of Savannah Center for Cultural Affairs in May 2014. She has been published in literary journals such as Sink Review, Burningword, Eleven-and-Half, and Release, and she guest-edited the Summer 2015 issue of Five Quarterly. Most recently, she was a Winter 2016 Ragdale writer-in-residence where she worked on her novel-in-progress—a multi-generational tale of brothers, sisters, and show business—called HOW TO CRY ON CUE.
Josh Denslow’s stories have appeared in Barrelhouse, Third Coast, Cutbank, Wigleaf, and Black Clock, among others. His collection Not Everyone is Special will be published in 2019 by 7.13 Books. In addition to constructing elaborate Lego sets with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane and edits at SmokeLong Quarterly.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Nancy Huang’s debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter. With readings from Nancy and special guests Philip Olalo, Noor Wadi, and Jasmine Bell.
Favorite Daughter is a poetry collection trying to uproot America from inside the body, and find where China is buried underneath. Divided into four parts, Daughter explores ideas like navigating hybridity, localism, and harmony in ways that disturb commonly-held notions about broad terms like “belonging” and “cultural struggle.” A compilation of immigration stories, Chinese radio segments, Google translate entries, and dictionary remixes, Favorite Daughter shows Huang immersing herself in everything she is uncertain of.
NANCY HUANG grew up in America and China. She is a winner of the 2016 Write Bloody Poetry Chapbook contest, an Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets Prize, a Regents Arts & Humanities Award finalist, a James F. Parker Award in Poetry, a 2015 YoungArts Finalist prize, and was a winner of the Michigan Young Playwrights Festival. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl, Bodega Magazine, TRACK//FOUR, Winter Tangerine Review, The Shade Journal, and others. This past summer she was the youngest attendant of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer graduate session. She is a VONA alum.
PHILIP OLALO is a 23-year-old Queer Fat Brown Poet based out of Austin, TX. Born in Manila, Philippines their poetry reflects their diaspora heart. They currently attend the University of Texas at Austin with plans to graduate with a degree in International Relations along with a minor in Asian Studies. To Philip, poetry is claiming the power in their voice. It is how they have learned to speak their truth. Philip’s work is for all the queer fat brown babes who’ve ever felt alone. Their current goals include being so kind in this life that they are reincarnated as a dog in the next life.
NOOR WADI is a Palestinian, Muslima poet who writes about her roots in revolution and under political oppression. She started writing poetry in high school, and back then, she had dreams of becoming a rapper when she grew up. Thankfully, the Slam Team at her undergrad, UT Dallas, gave her some direction and helped her realize that what she was writing was spoken word, and definitely not rap. Since then, she has been performing her poetry all over Texas. She is most proud of winning the title of UT Dallas Underground Poetry Circus Champion in 2014. Noor is so honored to have the opportunity to take her work to Chicago with the amazing SPITSHINE Team for CUPSI 2017. In her free time, Noor is a second-year law student at UT Austin who loves drinking bubble tea and watching Miyazaki movies.
JASMINE C. BELL is an emerging poet and artist in Austin, Texas and currently attends the University of Texas with plans to major in psychology and minor in Mandarin Chinese. In 2015 she was a member of the UT Spitshine slam poetry team that went to CUPSI, where they placed 13th nationally and won the award for “Best Writing by a Team”. In 2016 she returned to CUPSI with Spitshine where they placed 11th nationally. Jasmine also competed in Rustbelt 2016 and will represent UT again in 2017. She is Co-President of the only poetry organization on UT’s campus (Spitshine Poetry), where she leads workshops and organizes open mics. She has been published or is forthcoming in Button Poetry, Write About Now, Monstering Magazine, and Apricity Magazine. She spends her time writing, studying, drawing, singing, and eating.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Todd Hawkins’ chapbook Ten Counties Away (Finishing Line Press, 2017). With readings from Todd, Ken Fontenot, and Judy Jensen.
Professional editor and amateur soccer coach Todd Hawkins writes and lives in Crowley, Texas. His poetry has appeared in AGNI, The Bitter Oleander, American Literary Review, Bayou Magazine, Modern Haiku, and elsewhere. In 2011, he won the Texas Poetry Calendar Award, judged by Cyrus Cassells. He holds an MA in Technical Communication, loves the blues, and nightly loses to his wife at Mortal Kombat while the kids sleep.
Ken Fontenot received an MA in German Language and Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. During the school year 1986-87 he was awarded a DAAD fellowship to study in Freiburg, Germany. Author of the novel For Mr. Raindrinker set in 1970s New Orleans and published by Slough Press, he also published three books of poems, the second of which won the Austin Book Award, the third In a Kingdom of Birds having won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters award for best poetry book in Texas. His translations of contemporary poems from the German have appeared widely. A native New Orleanian, he lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Judy Jensen earned a MFA in creative writing from Vermont College and has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, Borderlands, and other anthologies and journals. She was a co-founder of the KinCity reading series and is a co-founder of Float Press, letterpress printing on a 1908 Golding Jobber #6. You might know her from her long-time volunteer work at Poetry at Round Top or her supernatural ability to attract stray animals like Merle, a peacock.
Join us for an afternoon with writer Dave Oliphant, who will be reading from his new poetry collection, The Hero’s Fall I Fell For: Jazz Poems. (At the reading The Hero’s Fall and the accompanying CD will be available for free on a first-come, first-served basis.)
With these poems devoted to jazz, Dave Oliphant offers a testament to the variety and significance of the art form and its artists. These poems are an attempt to pay homage to the art of jazz and to its musicians, whose lives and performances have long been a source of pleasure, inspiration, and solace.
Dave Oliphant was born in 1939 in Fort Worth, Texas. Host Publications has published two of his collections of poetry, Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (2000) and Backtracking (2004). His Maria’s Poems (1987) won an Austin Book Award. Host has also published three books that he translated from the Spanish: Enrique Lihn’s Figures of Speech (1999); Oliver Welden’s Love Hound (2006), winner of best book of poetry at the 2007 New York Book Festival; and Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations (2009), winner of the 2011 translation award from the Texas Institute of Letters. KD: A Jazz Biography, his verse biography of Texas trumpeter Kenny Dorham, was published in 2012 by Wings Press, and The Pilgrimage: Selected Poems, 1962-2012 appeared from Lamar University Press in 2013. The poetry collections The Cowtown Circle and María’s Book were published by Alamo Bay Press in 2014 and 2016 respectively. He was with the University of Texas at Austin for 30 years, as an editor and a senior lecturer.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Christopher Carmona’s new poetry collection, 140: Twitter Poems (bilingual edition, translated by Gerald Padilla). This book is a collection of 140 poems written over 140 days, covering the space of December 1, 2015 to April 12, 2016. Each poem represents a reflection of the day it was written and speaks of the social and political fervor of the day.
Christopher Carmona is the author of The Road to Llorona Park, which won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBCNews. He was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. He has three books of poetry: 140 Twitter Poems, I Have Always Been Here, and beat. He co-edited The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson and Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World with Rossy Evelin Lima. He has also co-written Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Poetics. Currently, he is co-editing Outrage: Witness and Silence and is working on a bilingual series of YA novellas entitled El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande. Book One will be published in 2018 by Jade Press.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Taisia Kitaiskaia’s Ask Baba Yaga (Andrews McMeel Publishing), a collection of “otherworldly advice for everyday troubles.”
In Slavic fairy tales, the witch Baba Yaga is sought out by those with a burning need for guidance. In contemporary life, Baba Yaga—a dangerous, slippery oracle—answered earnest questions on The Hairpin for years. Ask Baba Yaga collects her most poignant and humorous exchanges along with all-new questions and answers for those seeking her mystical advice.
*** Submit a personal question to Baba Yaga for a chance to hear the crone’s advice read live at the event! Send questions about struggles with love, work, or anything else to AskBabaYaga@gmail.com. Make sure to use the subject line “Malvern Event.” ***
Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in Russia and raised in America. She is the author of Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, illustrated by Katy Horan. Her poetry has been published widely. Baba Yaga lives deep in a treacherous wood; Taisia lives in Austin, Texas.
Do you want to join other poets, musicians, and artists around the world in a demonstration and celebration to promote peace, sustainability and justice, and to call for serious social, environmental and political change? On September 30, 2017, a global healing celebration will be happening through a multitude of events involving poets, artists, and musicians! Join host Joe Brundidge for this 100 Thousand Poets for Change event at Malvern Books.
Visit 100 Thousand Poets for Change to learn more about the movement.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Kurt Heinzelman’s new book of poetry, Whatever You May Say. With readings from Kurt and Danielle Sellers.
Kurt Heinzelman’s new book of poetry, Whatever You May Say, resembles what would have been called a “miscellany” in the 18th-century, the most popular way of constructing a poetry collection back then. Such miscellanies would include poems in many different genres and modes exhibiting a wide variety of formal characteristics. The poems might be spoken by multiple voices, and the collections would certainly include translations, another way of introducing voices not the author’s own. Heinzelman co-founded in the 1970s a highly regarded journal called The Poetry Miscellany. True to this origin, his new book includes an array of poetic forms (sonnet, photoessay, haiku, Provençal canso, Spanish “mote,” a valedictory address, and so on), narrative settings both foreign and domestic, a short one-person play (which was originally performed as a dance), and multiple translations, including one that is a poem for children. Heinzelman’s writing is “always a pleasure,” according to Lawrence Raab; this is “not a book to miss,” says Wendy Barker.
A native of Wisconsin, Kurt Heinzelman lived for a number of years in western Massachusetts. His work as a poet, scholar, and translator is widely published. He is also an editor, having co-founded two literary journals, The Poetry Miscellany and Bat City Review, and served as editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. He lives in Austin, Texas where he is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Texas and is a faculty member in the Michener Center for Writers.
Danielle Sellers is from Key West, FL. She has an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she held the John Grisham Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, The Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Her first book, Bone Key Elegies, was published by Main Street Rag. Her second poetry collection, The Minor Territories, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2018. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.
Join us for an evening with acclaimed writer and artist Eduardo Lalo, hosted by César A. Salgado.
The event will feature a bilingual reading from Lalo’s most recent book, Uselessness; a reading from a work-in-progress, Intemperie, a collection of Cioran- and Wittgenstein-like philosophical vignettes (with Sean Manning reading the English parts of these works); a conversation between Lalo, Salgado, and Manning about what the translation into English of Lalo’s past and recent work entails and implies, and a signing of some of Lalo’s recent books.
An award-winning Puerto Rican writer, essayist, photographer, and visual artist, Eduardo Lalo is known for cross-genre books that express his passion for both words and images. Among his titles are La Isla Silente (2002), Los Pies De San Juan (2002), La Inutilidad (2004), Donde (2005), Los Países Invisibles (2008), El Deseo Del Lápiz (2010), Necrópolis (2014), and Intemperie (2016). In 2013 he won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for Simone (2011), now available in English from The University of Chicago Press. His visual work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. He was LLILAS Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2016. Known for razor sharp columns in the island’s press, Lalo is today among the most outspoken and resolute critics of recurring colonialism in Puerto Rico and the world.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Kathryn Lane’s Backyard Volcano and Other Mysteries of the Heart, an anthology of short stories from Alamo Bay Press. Kathryn will be joined by Lowell Mick White.
These stories help define the world of the Texas-Mexico Frontier—an explosive world where lives break, loves shatter, and healing happens. Kathryn Lane, a native of Mexico, explores this world, leading readers on a journey through time and geography with the promise of magic and transformation. Lane’s short fiction contains a fusion between fantasy and reality, often layered with symbolism and punctuated by hints of surrealism.
Award-winning author Kathryn Lane writes fiction inspired by Latin American cultures she experienced during her career as an international finance executive and in her life growing up in Mexico. Her debut novel, Waking Up in Medellin, was recognized with a Killer Nashville Silver Falchion for Best Fiction Book of the Year 2017 and a second Silver Falchion for Best Fiction Adult Suspense 2017. Her novel also received a Pinnacle Achievement Award in Fiction. She is a 2017 finalist for the RONE Award in the Mystery category. In 2017, the novel was also released in Spanish, under the title Despertando en Medellín. Association of Writers and Writing Programs featured Kathryn on the Arriba Baseball! panel in Seattle (2014). She has been recognized in her community with a Montie Award for Excellence in the Arts, and as a member of the Rotary Club, she has twice been honored with the Paul Harris Award. She lives in Texas with her husband Bob Hurt, where she serves on the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council.
Lowell Mick White is the author of three books: Professed and That Demon Life, novels, and Long Time Ago Good, a story collection. Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and a Dobie-Paisano Fellow, White teaches at Texas A&M University.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Kathleen Peirce’s Vault. With readings from Kathleen and Lisa Olstein, and hosted by Cecily Parks.
Find here: poetry’s virtues/pleasures. Gorgeous witness. Silence muscled with qualities. Net of attentiveness rippling outward from the meeting of the seer and the seen. Kin to The Tempest: the wondrous woven of the mundane. The strength of purpose and hearkening needed to walk in beauty’s strangeness. Its sensuousness; its intimacy (especially with necessity) that supples its language. Patience of soul spun into physical brilliance. Time present and antique, interior and exterior, “feather of hair in one hand, / scissors in another, not the heart / beating but what might return over the heart.” These are the most beautiful poems I know. —Liz Waldner
Vault is Kathleen Peirce’s fifth book of poetry. Previous work has been awarded The AWP Award for Poetry, The Iowa Prize, and The William Carlos Williams Award. Her writing has been supported by the National Foundation for the Arts, The Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A member of the faculty with Texas State’s MFA program in Creative Writing since 1993, she lives in Wimberley.
Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Late Empire (October 2017). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Hayden Carruth Award, a Lannan Literary Residency, an Essay Press chapbook prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Centrum, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she currently serves as a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Lyman Grant’s new poetry collection, Old Men on Tuesday Mornings (Alamo Bay Press). The book is dedicated to four other Austin men—John Lee, Bill Jeffers, David Jewell, and John McElhenney—and they will also be reading at the launch.
Looking back across the vista of time, these poems keep a watchful eye on the memory-wolves that stalk us with their hard truths and expired dreams. The deep consideration of the many selves we’ve been along the way drew me in and held me-each piece taking a facet of the lived life and holding it close before letting it go. The writing is lush with compassion, honesty, joy, acceptance, and above all, lyricism. —Charlotte Gullick, author of By Way of Water
Old Men on Tuesday Mornings features lyrical poetry on the process of aging and the transition from one life-stage to another, on the passing of time and its relentless impact on masculinity and the male image, and on on the place of the solitary individual in 21st Century America.
Lyman Grant worked at Austin Community College for 34 years as a professor of English, Creative Writing, and Humanities. He is the author and editor of several books, including five volumes of poetry. The most recent is Old Men on Tuesday Mornings, poems inspired in a men’s writing group with John Lee, David Jewell, Bill Jeffers, and John McElhenney.
John Lee is author of the best-selling book The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man and twenty-three others. He is a counselor, coach, and public speaker.
David Jewell is a Neo-DaDa would-be astronaut bohemian and sometimes writer type.
Bill Jeffers is a tall person, sculptor, very low key political opinion-holder, and occasional poet of sorts.
John McElhenney is a social media strategist, dad, and writer, and blogs at uber.la.
Join us in celebrating the launch of two new books: Boyd Taylor’s Necessities, the fourth novel in the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series, and William Darling’s Anahuac, the second book in the Jim Ward series.
Boyd Taylor (above) is the author of four novels in the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series—Hero, The Antelope Play, The Monkey House, and his most recent work, Necessities (trailer here), which will be available to readers in November. Boyd, a graduate of the University of Texas and the UT Law School, has written fiction all his life. He was enrolled in Dr. Gerald Langford’s creative writing course at the University of Texas, who advised him to go to law school. He honed his fiction-writing skills as an attorney and later as an executive for a large chemical company, writing countless long-range business plans that required imagining the future in the form of scenarios, most of which never came to pass. Company assignments took Boyd and his family to locations as diverse as the Texas Panhandle, Appalachia, New England and the Texas Gulf Coast. He was able to travel the world on business. He learned from direct observation that however different people and places may seem, people everywhere face similar paradoxes of love and loss, life and death, and self-sacrifice and betrayal. Boyd lives with his wife in Austin, Texas. He has committed to her to write a novel a year and to keep to his study and his trusty Underwood typewriter, out of harm’s way. Unbeknownst to her, he is now using a MaxBookPro. Boyd welcomes inquiries and comments from his readers, who may contact him at Antelopecity@icloud.com or on his Facebook page.
William D. Darling (above) is a lifelong storyteller and very nearly a native Texan, arriving in his beloved state as an infant in 1942. His first novel, Morgan’s Point, introduced readers to both the mid-‘60s rough-and-tumble world of the Houston courts where Darling came of age, and the Galveston Bay region that has long fascinated him. His latest novel Anahuac, serves as a sequel to Morgan’s Point as well as its own fascinating tale. Darling, who has lived within the legislative bustle of Washington, D.C. and in the beauty of a Central Texas ranch, currently resides in Austin, where he and his wife have built a longstanding law practice.
Join us in celebrating the launch of the graphic novel I, Parrot, by acclaimed author Deb Olin Unferth and with stunning illustrations by artist Elizabeth Haidle. Deb and Elizabeth will be interviewed by award-winning writer Mary Helen Specht.
When Daphne loses custody of her son, she is willing to do whatever it takes to get him back―even if it means enlisting the help of the wayward love of her life, a trio of housepainters, a flock of passenger pigeons, a landlady from hell, a super-sized bag of mite-killing powder, and more parrots than she knows what to do with.
I, Parrot dips into the surreal with poignancy and humor. In this riveting, funny, and tragic graphic novel, Daphne must risk everything. Her quest is ultimately a tale about civilization’s decline, the heartbreak of extinction, and the redemption found in individual revolution.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and Tin House. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Elizabeth Haidle is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the creative director and regular contributor at Illustoria magazine, while writing and illustrating a nonfiction graphic novel series and raising her teenage son.
Mary Helen Specht’s first novel, Migratory Animals, was an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Austin American-Statesmen, an IndieNext Pick, and an Apple iBook selection. Migratory Animals also won the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book of Fiction. A past Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University. Texas Monthly has named her one of “Ten Writers to Watch.”
Illustrations above by Elizabeth Haidle
Join us in celebrating the launch of Meg Freitag’s debut poetry collection, Edith. Meg will be joined by Taisia Kitaiskaia and Blake Lee Pate.
In a time when so much of our poetry seems ironic and detached, its language overwrought or restrained, its associations timid or excessively mentalized, it’s a true pleasure to encounter this fresh new voice, vibrant and full of the wild sap of life. And like Edith, chained to the sky. — Dorianne Laux
“No one is free” says Bob Dylan, “even the birds are chained to the sky.” Edith is a book about a bird, a beloved bird that dies an untimely death and is mourned accordingly. Edith is ethereal, part muse, part icon, part confidant, her name echoes through the poems in what Pound would call the “manner of the musical phrase”, the way the name Tarumba sounds through the work of the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, or the name Naomi in Bill Knott’s first collection, repeats itself like a talisman.
Meg Freitag was born in Maine. She is the author of Edith (2017), selected by Dorianne Laux as winner of the 2016 BOAAT Book Prize. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was a Michener Fellow. Her work can be found in Tin House, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals.
Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in Russia and raised in America. She is the author of Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, illustrated by Katy Horan. Her poetry has been published widely. Her most recent work is Ask Baba Yaga, a collection of “otherworldly advice for everyday troubles.” Taisia lives in Austin, Texas.
Blake Lee Pate received her MFA in poetry from the New Writer’s Project and currently teaches English at Austin Community College. She has poems in the Dead Animal Handbook Anthology, Spoon River Poetry Review, Glittermob magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Rob Jackson’s The Witness, a collection of meditations in the form of poems, stories, and straight talk on spirituality.
The Witness is a modern take on a classic genre of spiritual works pioneered by the likes of Kahlil Gibran. It dances between playful verses, elegant stories, and contemplative poems that are not only pleasing sensually, but a call for deeper contemplation of life. The Witness is sometimes human, sometimes plant, sometimes inanimate, but always present and always deepening in awareness of self—inviting the reader to join in the experience through meditative practices.
Rob Jackson is a free-spirited, big-hearted fellow whose life journey has taken him from professional MMA fighter and coach, to project and business manager in energy and biotech, to advisor for nonprofit boards, to facilitator of workshops and community organizer. Currently, Rob is working on his next book, as well as writing blogs and articles. Rob’s work is to embody the invitation to come and play and express oneself as authentically as they are able. In this way, he teaches others to unleash their best potential. He does this through his writings, group events, and one-on-one intuitive counseling.
Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!
Performers include Siri, Ashley Nelcy García, Montserrat Madariaga, and Michael Reyes.
For twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Dos Gatos Press. This year’s reading will feature poets sharing Texas-related work, including their poems from the 2018 Texas Poetry Calendar (edited by Wade Martin, Allyson Whipple, and David Meischen).
Join us in celebrating the release of the Fall 2017 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review, which showcases poetry, prose, and artworks by students. During the event, students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Ryan Sharp’s new chabook, my imaginary old man: poems (Finishing Line Press). With readings from Ryan, Joe Brundidge, and Jennine “DOC” Wright.
The poems in my imaginary old man: poems construct a world alive with the ordinary and the mysterious. There is a sustained music to these poems, a music that sings out through an imagined throat, a music that both cracks a bell and is heard as the screech of tires. I like who this imagined man is, and how his idiosyncrasies could belong to any of us. These poems act like a mirror held up to the world asking us to notice what’s real all around and to search for what matters.
—Dorianne Laux, recipient of The Paterson Prize and author of The Book of Men
Ryan Sharp is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin where his research focuses on contemporary Black American persona poetry and the Archive. His poetry and reviews have appeared in several journals including Callaloo, Copper Nickel, and PANK. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin, TX, where he serves as the editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and as the Writers’ Studio Coordinator at Huston-Tillotson University.
Joe Brundidge has hosted a number of open mic events for almost 20 years, including Spoken & Heard at Kick Butt Coffee, an event he curates. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015.
Jennine “DOC” Wright is a mother, writer, artivist and educator in Austin, Texas. She has competed in world, national, and local competitions. She holds four titles to include Killeen Poetry Slam that placed 2nd overall in the nation in 2012 and Neo Soul Poetry Slam placing 1st in group piece finals in 2013. Jennine was the 2015 season slam champ for Austin’s Neo Soul and was also the coach for Austin Poetry Slam’s 2016 national team. She teaches English at Huston-Tillotson University while mentoring for the Speak Piece Poetry Project, a youth performance poetry program. She is currently wiring a musical and is also an MFA poetry student at Spalding University.
Join us in celebrating the launch of David Taylor’s third collection of poetry, Palm Up, Palm Down (Wings Press). With readings from David, Jim LaVilla-Havelin, and Bryce Milligan.
Palm Up, Palm Down draws on connections and commitments to home and place—human and nonhuman. Such a topic is not new to poetry; however, this book moves in circles, out and away, then returns home, rediscovering the quiet beyond/within the concept of “home.” The collection moves readers to slow not only their reading but encourages them to slow down the pace of their lives, allowing time to inhabit, listen, and invite in the broad array of neighbors.
David Taylor’s lyrical meditation on walking rhythmically through this world and noticing gleaming details with each footstep offers a reprieve from the blows of city life and the daily injustices on our streets. This book is a refuge. The poems are feather-light with the packed-in wisdom of old river stones. They know the currents. They do not move. What moves is the spirit in the dynamic lines of Taylor’s work. Whether we are circling the lake with the poet, or dancing to Havana’s rhythms, this poetry provides real company, partnership. —Marilyn Kallet, author of The Love That Moves Me
David Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability at Stony Brook University. His writing crosses disciplinary boundaries and genres—creative nonfiction, poetry, scholarship and science/technical writing; however, at the core of his work always is the concern for sustainability and community. One of his current projects is “The People’s Art and Modernism: Woody Guthrie, Joseph Campbell and Miguelito Valdés in New York in the 1940s.” Woody Guthrie’s writing (e.g. Bound for Glory) and music, Joseph Campbell’s interest in an ecology of folk mythologies, and the rise of popular Latin, esp. Afrocuban, music, for example, by Miguelito Valdés (or “Mr. Babalu”), function as windows into a time and place that allowed diverse interactions and legacies in the arts that still resonate today. Natural history writing and creative nonfiction include Lawson’s Fork: Headwaters to the Confluence (Hub City Press, 2000), a personal narrative on the history and natural history of Lawson’s Fork, Spartanburg’s local river. He edited an anthology, Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing (UNT Press, 2006). Steve Wolverton and he co-edited and contributed to a collection of essays about an interdisciplinary project on Mesa Verde archaeological sites and their representations to the public, titled Sushi in Cortez: Essays from the Edge of Academia (University of Utah Press, 2015). Taylor is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Praying Up the Sun (Pecan Grove Press, 2008) and The Log from The Sea of Cortez: A Poem Series (Wings Press, 2014).
Jim LaVilla-Havelin (above) is a poet, educator, and arts administrator. He is the author of four previous books of poems—Rites of Passage (Charon Press 1968), What the Diamond Does Is Hold It All In (White Pine Press 1978), Simon’s Masterpiece (White Pine Press 1983), and most recently, Counting (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). LaVilla-Havelin’s poems have appeared in the Texas Observer and other journals; in the anthologies Is This Forever, Or What? and Between Heaven & Texas; and in the Texas Poetry Calendar (and in Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair, the Dos Gatos Press anthology from the Texas Poetry Calendar). He was the Director of the Young Artist Programs at the Southwest School of Art for seventeen years, retiring in May 2013 to teach, write and consult. LaVilla-Havelin’s essays and criticism have appeared in Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Surface Design Journal, and exhibition catalogues of Danville Chadbourne and Rex Hausmann. He is editing a collection of poetry and visual art about sport, entitled Levelling the Playing Field, and is working on a book-length poem about jazz, Playlist. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator of National Poetry Month events in San Antonio, and the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News. He has taught, read, offered workshops, presentations, and teacher trainings throughout the Northeast, Ohio, and Texas. A twenty-two year Texan, LaVilla-Havelin lives with his wife, the artist Lucia LaVilla-Havelin, in Lytle, Texas.
Bryce Milligan (above) is an author working in numerous genres, from children’s books to novels for young adults, to adult poetry and criticism. Bloomsbury Review once called him a “literary wizard.” Critic Paul Christensen wrote of Milligan as “one of the principal writers of the region and a force at the center of the literary art movements of Texas.” Milligan was the book columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Light throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN American Center, and the Texas Institute of Letters, his reviews and essays appeared in many journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, et al. The founding editor of Pax: A Journal for Peace through Culture (1983-1987) and (with Roberto Bonazzi) Vortex: A Critical Review (1986-1990), he directed the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s literature program and its San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and Latina Letters conferences for several years. Milligan has been the publisher, editor and book designer of Wings Press since 1995. Wings Press has been profiled in numerous publications, including Poets & Writers Magazine and the Huffington Post. Milligan was the primary editor of Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (Riverhead, 1995)—which was the first all-Latina anthology to be published by a major American publishing house—and Floricanto Si: A Collection of Latina Poetry (Penguin, 1998). He has edited several smaller anthologies and critical collections, and designed numerous books for other presses. Milligan is the author of four historical novels and short story collections for young adults. With the Wind, Kevin Dolan (1987) received the Texas Library Association’s Lone Star Book Award. One of his children’s books, Brigid’s Cloak, was a 2002 “Best of the Year” pick by both the Bank Street College and Publishers Weekly. Some of his gallery theater pieces have been produced weekly at the Witte Museum in San Antonio for over 25 years. Milligan is also the author of six previous collections of poetry. His poetry and his song lyrics have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Southwest Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Clover, and Texas Observer, among others. Once upon a time, he was a working luthier and a singer/songwriter (twice a semi-finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folks songwriting competition). He has taught English and creative writing at every level, including workshops from California to Prague. Milligan is a recipient of the Gemini Ink “Award for Literary Excellence” and the St. Mary’s University President’s Peace Commission’s “Art of Peace Award” for “creating work that enhances human understanding through the arts.”
Join us in celebrating the launch of Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva. This event will feature readings and discussion from the translator, Jamey Gambrell.
Jamey Gambrell’s excellently translated edition with its well-researched and informative introduction graciously fulfils Tsvetaeva’s desire to see these pieces of diaristic prose bound in a single volume. —Rachel Polonsky, The Times Literary Supplement
Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters, find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life.
Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated works by Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya, in addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice trilogy and his Day of the Oprichnik and The Blizzard. This spring, the one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” premiered, featuring her translated surtitles of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry. Gambrell was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which recognizes “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.”
Join us for an afternoon with Coco Picard, Devin King, Anthony Madrid, Nadya Pittendrigh, and Julia Hendrickson. We’ll be celebrating the release earlier this year of Coco’s graphic novel The Chronicles of Fortune.
The Chronicles Of Fortune stands as a confirmation of the misfit’s path in life. Not only is it okay to be different, it’s okay to look like a failure in the eyes of others. Who cares? Just you, you’re the only one who needs to care. And are you happy? That seems to be what Picard is asking. —Comics Beats
Originally published as a series of mini-comics, The Chronicles of Fortune follows the lives of Fortuna, and her alter-ego, Edith-May, as they learn to cope with loss, recruiting a team of friends along the way. Discover a temperamental stove, a nosy mountain, a goofy crocodile, a loner moth, and a singing goldfish as they lead Fortuna on her greatest adventure. At once charming, sad, funny, poignant, and bizarre, The Chronicles of Fortune keeps one foot in mundane reality.
Coco Picard (above) is a writer, publisher, and curator. She is the Executive Director of The Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—and the Co-Director of Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/bookstore in Chicago. Her critical writing appears under the name Caroline Picard in publications like ArtForum (critics picks), art21, Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, and The Seen. A recent essay about the cats of James Joyce, Marcel Broodthaers, Derrida, the Walker Art Center, and Art Orienté object, The Strangers Among Us, was released in chapbook-form by Astrophil Press in 2017. Fiction and comics have appeared in Hyperallergic, The Coming Envelope (Book Thug), Necessary Fiction, Tupelo Quarterly, Everyday Genius and she has two contributions in vols 1 + 3 of The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press). TSK, a novel inspired by the ghost of Joseph Beuys, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in 2019.
Devin King is the co-director of Sector 2337 and the poetry editor for the Green Lantern Press. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. His second book, just out from Canarium (February 2017), is called Try Never.
Nadya Pittendrigh teaches writing at the University of Houston–Victoria.
Julia V. Hendrickson is a curator, writer, and editor, and the Associate Curator at The Contemporary Austin.
Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler. With M.C. W. Joe Hoppe, and featuring readings from David Jewell, Sylvia Manning, David Thornberry, and Larry Thoren. Plus, get a free copy of Huff’s book, Walking Wounded, with every purchase on December 17th!
Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”
In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.
This month’s guest is poet, playwright, and activist Nikki Luellen.
Nikki Luellen is a poet, playwright, and activist from Houston, Texas. In the past year, she has been writing and performing poems inspired by her active involvement with families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality and by her work with the group Refuse Fascism.
Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.
Join us in celebrating the launch of the second issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review, which features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities. Numerous poets and writers will read excerpts of their work from this edition, including Gloria Amescua, Catherine Castoro, Karen Collier, Marilyn Duncan, Gayle Guernsey, Stephen Hamilton, Lindsey Lane, and Allyson Whipple.
Join us in celebrating the release of John Vanderslice’s historical novel, The Last Days of Oscar Wilde. With readings from John Vanderslice and Lucas Schaefer.
Oscar Wilde is struggling through his final years in Paris. His reputation is ruined. His finances are in shambles. He drinks too much. He is reduced to begging meals from strangers; he even resorts to minor fraud to raise a few more pounds to live on. The most important romantic relationship of his life, his alliance with Lord Alfred Douglas, is now but a strained, overwrought friendship marked on both sides by resentments and guilt. And yet against this backdrop of poverty, social downfall, and disappearing fortitude, Oscar Wilde survives. While his sense of self has been rent, he maintains his humor, an active joie de vivre, an affection for superstitious religiosity, and a network of devoted friends. He even manages to fall in love again. But can his close circle of devoted friends convince him to pick up his pen one more time and write?
John Vanderslice teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Arkansas. His stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have appeared in scores of literary journals, including Laurel Review, Seattle Review, South Carolina Review, and Crazyhorse. His linked booked of stories Island Fog (Lavender Ink Press) was named by Library Journal as one of the Top 15 Indie Fiction Titles of 2014. His historical novel The Last Days of Oscar Wilde has just been released by Burlesque Press.
Join us for an evening with acclaimed poet Carl Phillips. We’ll be celebrating the recent release of his new collection, Wild Is the Wind. This event is sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers.
In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft.” —Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review
Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018). His collection The Rest of Love (FSG, 2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other books include Rock Harbor (FSG, 2002); The Tether (FSG, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Carl Phillips is a visiting poet at the Michener Center for a one week residency this semester.
In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.
This month’s guest is scientist and author Juli Berwald.
Marine invertebrates stole Juli Berwald’s heart on her first snorkel in the Red Sea during college. Hoping to study the ocean forever, she spent seven years building mathematical algorithms to interpret satellite imagery of the ocean, receiving her Ph.D. in ocean science. Her husband stole her heart next, and she drifted away from the ocean to Austin, Texas to be with him. Landlocked, she wrote textbooks and popular science articles for National Geographic, the New York Times, Nature, and Redbook before the story of jellyfish led her back to the sea. Her science memoir, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, is “a heartfelt plea for humans to fulfill their responsibilities toward nature” (The New Yorker).
Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.