Join us in celebrating the launch of Bryce Milligan’s Take to the Highway: Arabesques for Travelers, a collection of poems and prose poems. With readings from Bryce Milligan and W. Joe Hoppe, and music from Bryce.
“Bryce Milligan’s Take to the Highway is a book of big heart, big mind, and a big eight-cylinder engine, bringing poems—especially the stretched out prose poems—of distinction and evocative power.” —Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Ten Windows
“Take to the Highway is indeed about highways, but more crucially it’s about journeys, and about the intricate memory map of human consciousness. It’s a great pleasure to follow Bryce Milligan along side roads, detours, switchbacks, and eerily beckoning paths; and to encounter at the end a design, a destination, a questing mind at peace.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo
Bryce Milligan is an author working in numerous genres, from children’s books to novels for young adults, to adult poetry and criticism. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN American Center, and the Texas Institute of Letters, his reviews and essays have 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. 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. He is the author of four historical novels and short story collections for young adults. He 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.”
W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.