Thank you for another wild year!

In 2019, the Poetic Research Bureau hosted 140+ writers, artists and filmmakers. With our partners, the Public School LA and RAD! Residencies, 951 Chung King Road opened its doors for more than 80 events!

Since our first reading in February of 2000, PRB programs have always been free and open to all comers. The space is funded entirely on donations and out-of-pocket cash. If it looks like the Bureau is mostly the result of two slowly greying oddballs continuing to lurk near the light-switches, chuckle at the podium and roll out countless programs for devotees of the "difficult arts", well, it's admittedly that. But if it looks and feels like a lot more than that, that's because you, our dear friends – community and audience – make it everything else.

Which is a crazy lot after all this time!

Once or twice a year, we pipe up to ask y'all to throw some coin into our realm, and December is one of those times. We're super frugal with your contributions, we promise. Every donation goes to rent, utilities, insurance and the free beverages and comestibles we provide for our visitors. $20,000 funds us for the whole year; $10,000 gets us to summer recess. It's a pretty modest sum given that thousands of people each year come through the doors. And RAD! and TPS ride along as fellow travelers.

The PRB will reopen in January, and the calendar is already filling up. In the meantime, please remember us for the holidays, and send a tax-deductible donation by punching this big-ass donation button here:

Your pals,
Joe & Andrew

Saturday, November 23: Rodrigo Bravo & Sean Negus

RODRIGO BRAVO holds a Master’s in Linguistics with a background in Classics and Hebrew Studies at the University of São Paulo. He is a translator and researcher in linguistics with emphasis in translation of poetic discourse, comparative literature, and stychology. Lecturer at the graduate school of music at Faculdade Santa Marcelina, he develops his doctoral research at the Graduate School of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies at USP. Curator of the TransFormações exposition, at Casa das Rosas (SP) (2017), he also serves as a member of the editorial board of the literary series Neûron at Editora Córrego. Bravo authored academic essays, articles and the books Ernesto na Torre de Babel (2016), Poligonia do Haikai (2017), Teso (2018), Um Livro para Rufino (2018), and Mavórcio Libreto (2019). He is one of the creators of Saccades: a review of Contemporary Brazilian poetry.

SEAN NEGUS teaches in the Writing & Literature Program at California College of the Arts. His scholarly research has examined the relationship between human consciousness and self-representation in experimental autobiographies, as well as histories of alternative spiritualities in counter-cultural literature, such as Buddhism in the Beat Generation. He is a translator of poetry from Portuguese and co-edits (with Rodrigo Bravo) the journal Saccades, focusing on contemporary Brazilian poetry. In 2018, he guest/co-edited an edition of DUSIE magazine featuring the work of more than fifty-two contemporary Brazilian poets and visual artists. Hurricane Music, his first collection of poems, is just out from Editora Córrego.

* * *

A night of Brazilian poetry
in Portuguese & English with
RODRIGO BRAVO
& SEAN NEGUS

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm 

951 Chung King Rd

Chinatown, LA 

Friday, November 22: David Rattray Book Launch with Robert Dewhurst & Chris Kraus

Book launch
HOW I BECAME ONE OF THE INVISIBLE
by David Rattray
published by Semiotext(e)

with Robert Dewhurst
& Chris Kraus

Friday, November 22, 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Alden Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers.

Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new, expanded edition includes nine new texts, three of which were previously unpublished; an introduction by Robert Dewhurst; and an afterword by Rachel Kushner.

Join the book’s editors Chris Kraus and Robert Dewhurst for a night of readings from the new edition, followed by rare film footage of David Rattray himself reading.

~

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, three books of art and cultural criticism, and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. In 1992, she edited David Rattray’s How I Became One of the Invisible for Semiotext(e) after working with him on Readings From The Diaries of Hugo Ball and other projects. Kraus is a co-editor of Semiotexte alongside Hedi El Kholti and Sylvere Lotringer. She teaches writing at Art Center.

Robert Dewhurst is a scholar and poet. With Joshua Beckman and CAConrad, he coedited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015). Recently, he edited, with an introduction, an expanded second edition of David Rattray's prose collection How I Became One of the Invisible (Semiotext(e), 1992/2019). He lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently writing a biography of Wieners.

David Rattray (1936–1993) was a poet, translator, and scholar, fluent in most Western languages, Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. He translated the works of Antonin Artaud, René Crevel, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, among others.

Saturday, November 16: Chelsea Rector, Jeremy Kennedy & Benjamin Bekey

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Chelsea Rector, Jeremy Kennedy, and Benjamin Bekey will present their contributions and respective "cry lists" to celebrate the recent release Cry List (Rebel Hands Press - 2019), a collection of essays on the topic of crying, along with a variety show of poetic conversations. Tearful tunings and real realizations with absurdity stirred in. Tissues issued.

--

Chelsea Rector is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. She has worked in experimental theater with Medium Judith and the Godawfful National Theater Company, co-founding the movement ensemble BEST FRIENDS in 2014 and the P/SICHO ST. THEATER COMPANY in 2018. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Press where she is a guest editor and she is the Assistant Managing Editor for Rebel Hands Press. In winter, 2019 Rebel Hands Press will publish her forthcoming book, On Being Mean.

Since the late 1990’s, Jeremy Kennedy has been creating and exhibiting artwork, sounds and concepts in both community and academic settings. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2009, the multidisciplinary artist spent over a decade living and working in Bloomington, Indiana. Kennedy is an active visual artist, writer, and sound-maker, as well as co-founder and playwright with P/Sicho Street Theatre Company, and a founding editor of Rebel Hands Press.

Benjamin Bekey is a writer and performer, concerned with drawing meaning from the failures and limitations of language and communication. He lives in Los Angeles.

--

About the book:

Cry List

Contributors: Chelsea Rector, Jamie Iacoli, Jeremy Kennedy, Sammi Skolmoski, William Gass

Photography: Ang Wilson

Crying is nothing other than itself. Metaphor is a construct that brings crying out of itself… These essays are accounts of crying, and the essay lists are not metaphors. It is a way for the authors to say that these things have taken them, emotionally, directly. No metaphors. What these essays account is the form of agitation we call crying. From joy to sorrow, the items listed explore the questions, what does it take/what makes us cry?. The lists are a conceptual framework, organizing the otherwise indomitable act of crying.

The essays each list five items that make the authors cry… Unlimited in range, about the tangible or abstract, the essays also ask you, the reader, to think about when you cry. Cry List is a collection of insights on opening the hermetically sealed core of crying through connection with another form of expression that appears outside the body. Scored throughout with watery photographic notation, Cry List assembles a world of feeling, tangential to objective reality.

~ Edition: 100
Rebel Hands Press (2019)
www.rebelhandspress.com

Saturday, November 9: Jacob Kahn, Eric Sneathen & Jeanne Vaccaro

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

JACOB KAHN
ERIC SNEATHEN
& JEANNE VACCARO

Saturday, November 9

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Jacob Kahn is a poet and manager/editor at E.M. Wolfman Books, a bookstore, small press and community arts hub in downtown Oakland, CA. He is the author of the chapbooks, Mine Eclogue (Dirty Swan Projects, 2019) and A Circuit of Yields (Wolfman Books, 2014). Other recent writing can be found or is forthcoming in Lana Turner, MARY, Full Stop Quarterly, Elderly, and Mirage #5 Period(ical). He is a 2018 Frontier Fellow at Epicenter in Green River, Utah, a rural design studio and community-based artist residency, and a co-founding editor of the poetry chapbook press, Eyelet Press.

Eric Sneathen splits his time between Oakland and Santa Cruz, where he is a PhD candidate in Literature. His first collection, Snail Poems, was published by Krupskaya in 2016. New poems have been published by bæst, Mirage #5/Period(ical), New Life Quarterly, Snail Trail, and Amerarcana. With Daniel Benjamin, he organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today and edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017).

Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer, curator, and scholar in residence at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC. She is the recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital, and her chapbook, "A Collective Mixtape," is out on Belladonna's Lesbian All Star series.

Saturday, November 2: Emmalea Russo, Kate Durbin, Fiona Alison Duncan & Corina Copp

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

EMMALEA RUSSO
KATE DURBIN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
& CORINA COPP

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Emmalea Russo’s books are G (Futurepoem) and Wave Archive (Book*hug). She was a writer in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the 18th Street Arts Center, and a visiting writer at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Parsons School of Design. Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Artcritical, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Cosmopolitan, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and SF MOMA's Open Space. She is a practicing astrologer and sees clients, writes, and podcasts on astrology and art at the Avant-Galaxy.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose work focuses on popular culture and digital media. Her books include E! Entertainment (Wonder), The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and ABRA (1913 Press). ABRA is also a free, interactive iOS app that is "a living text," which won the 2017 Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature. In 2015, she was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia. She has performed or shown her artwork at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the Haifa Museum in Israel, Transfer Gallery, and elsewhere. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum, Yale's American Scholar, NPR, The Believer, BOMB, and more.

Corina Copp has translated two texts by Chantal Akerman, the memoir, My Mother Laughs (The Song Cave, 2019), and the play, Night Lobby (e-flux, forthcoming). She is the author of the poetry collection, The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), among other chapbooks; and other writing can be found soon or now in America: Films From Elsewhere (Shoestring Press, 2019), Film Comment, Frieze, BOMB, and other publications.

Fiona Alison Duncan is a Canadian American writer, artist, and organizer. She is the founding host of Hard to Read and Pillow Talk. Duncan's debut novel Exquisite Mariposa was just released with Soft Skull Press.

Saturday, October 26: Devin King, Evan Kleekamp & Patrick Durgin

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

DEVIN KING
EVAN KLEEKAMP
& PATRICK DURGIN

Saturday, October 26 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Devin King is the poetry editor for The Green Lantern Press. A narrative poem, The Grand Complication, is out from Kenning Editions. Previous books and chaps: CLOPS, These Necrotic Ethos Come the Plains, and The Resonant Space. Criticism on poetry and sound studies can be found at The Chicago Review, Make Magazine, Plume Poetry, Dusted, and Critical Inquiry.

Evan Kleekamp lives in Los Angeles. They are a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant finalist.

Patrick Durgin’s PQRS: A Poets Theater Script was published in 2013. He is also coauthor, with Jen Hofer, of The Route and editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House. Durgin also makes artist's books, most recently Zenith. His performance text, "Interference," was published in Emergency Index. He teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Correspondence: Rosenthal, Witte, Armendinger, Foster & Sarbanes

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

CORRESPONDENCE: a celebration of two new releases from The Operating System: THE GRASS IS GREENER WHEN THE SUN IS YELLOW, by Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte, and STREET GLOSS, by Brent Armendinger. 

Featuring additional readings by Sesshu Foster and Janet Sarbanes. 

~

Friday, October 25 2019

Doors 7:20pm
Reading 8pm

~

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of several books and chapbooks including 'The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow' (The Operating System, 2019; a collaboration with Valerie Witte) 'Lizard' (Chax, 2016), and 'Manhatten' (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009). She edited 'A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area' (Dalkey Archive, 2010). She has done grant-supported writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, New York Mills, Hambidge, and This Will Take Time, and has been a Headlands Center Affiliate Artist. She lives in San Francisco where she works as a Life & Professional Coach, develops curricula for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, and serves on the California Book Awards jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net.

Valerie Witte is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish Books, 2015) and three chapbooks, most recently The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019), a collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal. She is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School, and for eight years, she helped produce many innovative books by women as a member of Kelsey Street Press. In her daytime hours, she edits education books in Portland, OR. Read more at valeriewitte.com.

Brent Armendinger's new book is Street Gloss, a hybrid work of site-specific poetry and experimental translation, featuring Argentinian writers Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Néstor Perlongher, and Diana Bellessi, and drawings by Alpe Romero (The Operating System, 2019). Brent is also the author of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. He teaches creative writing at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles. His website is brentarmendinger.com.

Sesshu Foster has taught comp and lit in East L.A. for 35 years. His last book, City of the Future (Kaya Press, 2018), won the 2019 CLMP Firecracker Award. A forthcoming novel, ELADATL, a History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, is a collaboration with artist Arturo Ernesto Romo and will be published by City Lights Books in 2020.

A 2017 recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol art writer’s grant, Janet Sarbanes has published art criticism and other critical writing in museum catalogues, anthologies, and journals such as East of Borneo, Afterall, Journal of Utopian Studies, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2018, she helped program a series of events at CalArts around the 50th anniversary of Fluxus artists Alison Knowles's House of Dust, which was situated on campus from 1969-1971 and served as a locus of alternative pedagogy, art-making, and communal practice. Sarbanes is the author of the short story collections Army of One and The Protester Has Been Released, and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing and MA Aesthetics and Politics programs at CalArts.

Saturday, October 19: Grady, Joseph, Thomas, Villarán & Wagner

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

Saturday, October 19

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Kendall Grady's poems have appeared in Dusie, The Atlas Review, and Roomba, a chapbook from The Museum of Expensive Things. They are interested in something like loving the social body.

Jared Joseph is boring.

Cathy Thomas (she/her) received her PhD at UC Santa Cruz in Literature with a designated emphasis in Creative Critical writing. She is now a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow working with Nalo Hopkinson to figure out simple ways to “semantically-neurochemically induce” Afrofutures into our “higher-level living autopoietic system.”© Her interests lie in the Caribbean diaspora, carnival culture and practices, decolonial feminist thought, and discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, cosplay, and pop culture. When she is not writing, or cos-playing, or wining up at carnival, she procrasti-makes short films, linocuts, things that satisfy her love of chemistry, and things that evoke memories of the South Bronx like tiny gardens and Guyanese dishes she loved as a child.
© Sylvia Wynter in Sylvia Wynter:On Being Human as Praxis. Ed Katherine McKittrick (Duke Press, 2015)

Jose Antonio Villarán is the author of two books of poetry: la distancia es siempre la misma (Matalamanga, 2006) & el cerrajero (Album del Universo Bakterial, 2012); one book of translation, Album of Fences, by Omar Pimienta (Cardboard House Press, 2018); and creator of the AMLT project (http://amlt-elcomienzo.blogspot.pe), an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship, which was sponsored by Puma from 2011-2014. His third book, titled open pit, is forthcoming from AUB in 2019. He holds an MFA in Writing from the University of California - San Diego, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Literature at the University of California - Santa Cruz.

Kirstin Wagner is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate in the UCSC Literature Department. Her research concerns inherited trauma in families organizing around domestic violence. Her creative work is published/forthcoming in Genealogy, Bombay Gin Literary Journal, Gesture Literary Journal, and Something on Paper. She has taught creative writing at Naropa University, Indiana University, UC-Santa Cruz, and in the Boulder public school system. You can find her hiding fairies in the redwoods, writing at the beach at 3am, or eating pizza anywhere, anytime.

Friday, October 18: Daniel Poppick & Feliz Lucia Molina

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

DANIEL POPPICK
& FELIZ LUCIA MOLINA

Friday, October 18 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Daniel Poppick is the author Fear of Description (Penguin, 2019), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and The Police (Omnidawn, 2017). He lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a copywriter and co-edits the Catenary Press.

Feliz Lucia Molina was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. Her books include Undercastle (Magic Helicopter Press), The Wes Letters (Outpost19), Roulette forthcoming from Make Now Books, and Thundercastle is forthcoming. She can be found at felizluciamolina.com

Saturday, October 12: Angélica Freitas & Hilary Kaplan

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

Angélica Freitas 

& Hilary Kaplan 

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

~

Saturday, October 12

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Angélica Freitas is the author of two books of poetry, Rilkeshake (Rilke Shake) and Um útero é do tamanho de um punho (The uterus is the size of a fist), chosen best book of poetry in 2012 by the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte. Her graphic novel, Guadalupe, was illustrated by Odyr Bernardi. She has also collaborated with artist Nuno Ramos and musicians Juliana Perdigão and Vitor Ramil. Freitas's poems have been published in Poetry and other magazines internationally. She lives in São Paulo, Brazil.

Hilary Kaplan is the translator of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, which won the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award in 2016. Her most recent translations are Marília Garcia's The Territory Is Not the Map, and 46750, a collaboration between photographer João Pina and poet Viviane Salles. Ms. Kaplan has contributed to Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, and BBC Radio 4. Her other translations include Paloma Vidal's short story collection, Ghosts, and poems by Ricardo Domeneck and Claudia Roquette-Pinto.

Friday, October 11: Robert Fitterman & Kim Calder

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

ROBERT FITTERMAN
& KIM CALDER

Friday, October 11, 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Robert Fitterman is the author of 15 books of poetry including Rob’s Word Shop (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Dave (Counterpath, forthcoming Spring 2020),This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Nevermind (Wonder Books, 2016), and No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014). He has collaborated with several visual artists, including: Serkan Ozkaya, Sabine Herrmann, Nayland Blake, Natalie Czech, Donald Owen Colley, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists and poets collective, Collective Task. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and at the Bard College, Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies. A lot of his writing is here: www.robertfitterman.com

Kim Calder is a doctoral student in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books/LARB Quarterly, ASAP/Journal, and Jacket2. She is currently working on two manuscripts: The Nervous System, an autotheoretical work, and her dissertation, which investigates how indigeneity circulates in contemporary American literature.

Saturday, October 5: Johanna Drucker & Anna Wolfe-Pauly

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

JOHANNA DRUCKER
& ANNA WOLFE-PAULY

Saturday, October 5, 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Johanna Drucker is an artist and writer who is internationally known for her work in artists’ books, the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Her work is represented in special collections in museums and libraries in the North American and Europe. Her recent titles include Downdrift: An EcoFiction and The General Theory of Social Relavity, both published in 2018. She is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA.

Anna Wolfe-Pauly is an American artist and writer who develops tools to improve communication with remote space. She has shared her work in the USA, UK, Spain, and Canada. Her first book Let's Be Frank was released through Publication Studio earlier this year.

Friday, September 27: Our Families, Our Stories: Writing and Parenting in the Trenches

Doors 7:30pm
Event 8pm

~

With Pat Alderete, Lane Igoudin, Michael Kearns, Carla Sameth, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, and Carla Sameth

~

Readings (fiction/memoir/poetry) followed by discussion. For those LGBTQ writers who are parents, the realities of parenthood intersects at every level of the professional author experience. Queer parents are often intentional in creating their families and in how they position their identities as writers, from craft to publication and marketing. Markedly so when you define yourself as other than a traditional “parent” and know how much words matter. This interdisciplinary program features diverse authors who have published in multiple genres in magazines and books. The queer parenting experience is historically underrepresented and is now a rising area of focus in literary publishing. Panelists will talk about how they both write about and interrogate some of the assumptions of parenting today.

Thursday, September 26: Intensely Feeling Pop Culture

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm


~


Part of LAMBDA's Lit Fest week, Intensely Feeling Pop Culture is a reading featuring poets and writers who explore popular culture in their work.

Readers include: Ryka Aoki, Kate Durbin, Myriam Gurba, JoAnna Novak, Sophia Le Fraga, and Christopher Soto.

Christopher Soto (b. 1991) is a poet based in Los Angeles, California. He works at UCLA with the Ethnic Studies Centers and sits on the Board of Directors for Lambda Literary. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration.

JoAnna Novak is the author of the novel I Must Have You (2017) and the book-length poem Noirmania (2018); her second book of poetry, Abeyance, North America, will be published in 2020. Her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, the Washington Post, Slate, Salon, and BOMB. A founding editor of the literary journal and chapbook press Tammy, Novak is an assistant professor of creative writing at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles.

Ryka Aoki is the author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele a Hilo and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. She has appeared in Vogue, Elle, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Huffington Post, and was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” She worked with the American Association of Hiroshima Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, and two of her compositions were adopted as the organization’s official “songs of peace.” Ryka is the Director of The After School Workspace at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Head Instructor of Supernova Queer Martial Arts, and Founder of Studio Passoire. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and is a professor of English at Santa Monica College.

Myriam Gurba is a high school teacher, writer, podcaster and artist who lives in Long Beach, California. Her most recent book, the true crime memoir Mean, was a New York Times editors’ choice. Publishers Weeklydescribes her as a “literary voice like none other.” Gurba co-hosts the AskBiGrlz advice podcast with cartoonist MariNaomi. Her collage, digital artwork, and photography has been shown in museums, galleries, and community centers.

Sophia Le Fraga is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of literallydead and I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET. Le Fraga's ongoing interview series, "Having a Smoke With You," consists of cigarette-long chats with artists and writers. She is a member of Collective Task and the founding editor of @No___Ish, an Instagram zine.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose work focuses on popular culture and digital media. Her books include E! Entertainment (Wonder), The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and ABRA (1913 Press). ABRA is also a free, interactive iOS app that is "a living text," which won the 2017 Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature. In 2015, she was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia. She has performed or shown her artwork at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the Haifa Museum in Israel, Transfer Gallery, and elsewhere. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum,Yale's American Scholar, NPR, The Believer, BOMB, and more.

Saturday, Sept 21: Jorge Ortega with Anthony Seidman

The Poetic Research Bureau presents a bilingual reading with Mexican poet Jorge Ortega and translator/poet Anthony Seidman.

 * * *

Jorge Ortega is a Mexican poet and essayist born in Mexicali, Baja California. His books include Ajedrez de polvo, Estado del tiempo, Guía de forasteros, and Bedouins. His poems, book reviews and articles have appeared in Letras Libres, Nexos, Quimera, Revista de Occidente and Periódico de Poesía. Currently a research teacher at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at CETYS University in Baja California.

Anthony Seidman is a poet-translator from Los Angeles. His translations include Smooth-Talking Dog: Poems by Roberto Castillo Udiarte (Phoneme Media), For Love of the Dollar (Unnamed Press) by J.M. Servín, Luna Park (Cardboard House Press) by Luis Cardoza y Aragón, and A Stab in the Dark by Facundo Bernal (LARB Classics). His latest collection of poetry is A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed (Eyewear Publishing).

 * * *  

Saturday, September 21 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

951 Chung King Road

Chinatown, Los Angeles

 

Saturday, September 7: Sophia Dahlin, Turner Capehart Canty & Joseph Mosconi

The Poetic Research Bureau begins its fall season with

SOPHIA DAHLIN
TURNER CAPEHART CANTY
& JOSEPH MOSCONI

Saturday, September 7

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Sophia Dahlin is in Oakland, California. She holds poetry workshops at E.M. Wolfman Books, in a library basement, and sometimes in the bike room of her cooperative house. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Elderly, The Recluse, and the Poetry Foundation's PoetryNow series. With Jacob Kahn, she edits the chapbook press Eyelet.

Turner Capehart Canty is a poet living in Oakland, CA. His chapbooks include Foundation (LMNOP) and the forthcoming I Want to Miss Them (Eyelet). Other writings can be found in Fence, Coldfront Magazine, and in the recent publication Libertines in the Ante-room of Love (Jet-Tone Press). You can find Turner's music at turnercapehart.bandcamp.com.

Joseph Mosconi is a writer and taxonomist based in Los Angeles. He co-directs the Poetic Research Bureau and is the author of several books, including Ashenfolk (Make Now Books, 2019), Fright Catalog (Insert Blanc Press, 2013), Demon Miso/Fashion In Child (Make Now Books, 2014), Renaissance Realism (Gauss PDF, 2016), and, with Pauline Beaudemont, an artist book called This Arrogant Envelope (FCAC Geneva, 2017).

Saturday, August 17 screening: If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? by Jarett Kobek (The Movie!)

On Saturday, August 17th, 951 Chung King Road once again opens its doors and lends its venue to a screening series dedicated to the odd and obscure programmed by filmmaker, Nick Toti. This latest installment will be the first (and quite possibly only) screening of Toti's own newest work, If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? by Jarett Kobek (The Movie!). 

In 2012, Jarett Kobek published a book comprised primarily of transcriptions from the most banal moments of various celebrity sex tapes (with occasional detours into the public deaths of brutal dictators and other marvels of modern living). In an interview at the time, he described his thought process thus: "In a brattish fit of pique, I decided that people were idiots without interest in anything except the filth of celebrity culture. So why not just give people what they want?"

In 2017, Nick Toti read Kobek's book while recovering from a minor mental and physical breakdown following a tremendously stressful film shoot. Thereafter Toti spent the next 18 months sporadically (and often half-heartedly) working to to adapt this book for the screen.

Nick Toti and Jarett Kobek will both be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. This screening will also feature the short film Fucking Freak by Salamo Manetti-Lax.

* * *

Date: Saturday, August 17th
Time: doors open at 7:30pm; screening begins at 8:00pm
Location: Poetic Research Bureau 

951 Chung King Rd (Chinatown), Los Angeles, CA 90012
Cost: Free

Sunday, June 23: A Memorial Reading for Kevin Killian

We mourn the loss of the great writer Kevin Killian, who passed away on June 15th at the age of 66.

On Sunday afternoon, June 23rd, we will hold an informal memorial reading at the Poetic Research Bureau. We will have copies of his books to borrow, and folks are encouraged to read a little something from them, or to share a memory, or to listen.

Sunday, June 23

3pm to 5pm.

Saturday, June 22: The Influx Collective presents Queer Poetry Night

The Influx Collective present
QUEER POETRY NIGHT

with
Lilly Safarian
Diane Heaven
Andres Sanchez
Carla Sameth

~

Saturday, June 22

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Friday, June 21: Locascio/Apekina/Arterian/LaBrie/Lee/Rowbottom

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

LISA LOCASCIO
with
KATYA APEKINA
DIANA ARTERIAN
SARAH LABRIE
LISA LEE
ALLIE ROWBOTTOM

~

Friday, June 21 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Readings troubling the edges of intimacy and transformation by six writers in celebration of the paperback release of Lisa Locascio's Open Me, a political and erotically-charged debut that follows a young American woman’s transformative journey during one pivotal summer abroad hailed by Viet Thanh Nguyen as “unflinching in its portrayal of sex, desire, racism, and the excitement and confusion of youth.”

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Katya Apekina's short stories have appeared in various literary magazines. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, and the Alena Wilson prize. Her prose and poetry translations from Russian appeared in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky (FSG 2008), which was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the script for the independent film New Orleans, Mon Amour (2008). Her novel The Deeper The Water The Uglier The Fish, published in 2018, was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novel Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction.

Diana Arterian is the author of the poetry collection Playing Monster :: Seiche (1913 Press, 2017), the chapbooks With Lightness & Darkness and Other Brief Pieces (Essay Press, 2017), Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and co-editor of Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet, 2016). A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, her creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo, and her poetry, essays, and translations have been featured in Asymptote, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Poetry Foundation website, among others.

Sarah LaBrie is a writer and librettist. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Guernica, Lucky Peach, The Literary Review, Epoch, Taste, and Encyclopedia Journal, among other publications. Her work for the Industry Opera’s Hopscotch was featured in The New Yorker, Wired, and on NPR. dreams of the new world, a choral piece commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and developed with composer Ellen Reid, premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2018.

Lisa Lee’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the Inprint Foundation, Kundiman, and the Center for Fiction. Lisa received an MFA from the University of Houston and a BA from UC Berkeley, and she is currently a doctoral fellow in USC’s PhD program in Literature & Creative Writing.

Allie Rowbottom's debut book, Jell-O Girls is out now from Little Brown and Company. Her essays can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, The Florida Review, No Tokens, The South Loop Review, PQueue, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, A Women's Thing and elsewhere. Her essay “Ghosts and Houses” won the 2015 Editor’s Award from The Florida Review and received a "notable" mention in The Best American Essays of 2016. Her long lyric work, “World of Blue” received her a "notable" mention in The Best American Essays of 2015. She has taught fiction and non-fiction at the University of Houston and CalArts.

Lisa Locascio's work has appeared in The Believer, Tin House, n+1, Bookforum, and many other magazines. She is the editor of the anthology Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, editor of Joyland's West section and of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7x7LA. She is Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and Lecturer of Scandinavian at UCLA. Her novel Open Me is available now in paperback from Grove Atlantic.

Friday, June 14: Bogosi Sekhukhuni, manuel arturo abreu, Jasmine Nyende

Bogosi Sekhukhuni (b. 1991, Johannesburg) describes himself as a 'lightworker’. He studied at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has exhibited at the New Museum (NYC), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the 2017 African Biennale of Photography (Bamako), LUMA Westbau (Zürich), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Steve Turner Contemporary (LA), the 2nd Kampala Biennale, the 9th Berlin Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Tate Modern (London), MoMA Warsaw, and locally in Cape Town at Stevenson and Whatiftheworld, etc. Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the 'tech-health artist group' NTU and has worked with the CUSS Group collective. His most recent project is a 'visual culture bank and research gang' called Open Time Coven, which investigates 'emergent technologies and repressed African spiritual philosophies'.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet/artist from the Bronx. They live/work in a garage in southeast Portland, and received their BA in Linguistics (Reed College, 2014). They use what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. Recent exhibitions, projects, and discourse at AB Lobby Gallery (PSU, Portland), Yaby (Madrid), MoMA and MoMA PS1 (NYC), NCAD Gallery (Dublin), AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles), Centre d'Art Contemporain (Geneva), Veronica (Seattle), Rhizome and the New Museum (online), and locally in Portland at the Art Gym, Yale Union, Open Signal Portland Community Media Center, S1, etc. abreu wrote two books of poetry (List of Consonants and transtrender) and one book of critical art writing, Incalculable Loss (Institute for New Connotative Action Press, 2018). abreu composes club-feasible worship music as Tabor Dark.

Jasmine Nyende is an artist and vocalist for Black femme & them punk band FUCK U PAY US (FUPU). Her art practice spans performance, textiles, writing and community building as a form of activism. She leads a monthly fibers group centering how craft & DIY culture can be used for social justice.

Saturday, June 8: William E. Jones, M Kitchell & Jarett Kobek

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

WILLIAM E. JONES
M KITCHELL
& JARETT KOBEK

Saturday, June 8

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

***The Chinatown Summer Nights street festival will be happening the night of this reading. Parking will be more difficult than usual. Please consider a cab, Lyft, Uber or the Metro (there is a Chinatown stop a few blocks away from the PRB). Or consider parking a few blocks away from Chinatown and walking over. ***

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William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who lives in Los Angeles. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) and Fall into Ruin (2017). His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2010), Austrian Film Museum, and Oberhausen Short Film Festival (both 2011). He was included in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). His books include Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Imitation of Christ (2013), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). I’m Open to Anything is his first novel.

M Kitchell is an artist and movement practitioner who lives in Oakland, CA. Dedicated to obsessive research and the literal act of finding, Kitchell is primarily concerned with the impossible (or, perhaps, the outside) and levitation (or, perhaps, the float). An expanded list of his interests include landscape as limit-experience, hunting the void, ecstatic & trance states, inversion practice, and Georges Bataille's list of "apparently sovereign behaviors." In addition to his more conceptual interests, his regular physical practice involves investigations into the asana of post-ashtanga yoga, soft acrobatics & the flow-state. He continually explores modes of backbending as an invocation of a bridge between the world of the living and the dead, and handstanding due to its inherent subversion of a humanist verticality. He also teaches public handstand classes in Emeryville, CA. His latest book, Experimental Men, has just been released from Inside the Castle.

Jarett Kobek is the author of I Hate the Internet, Only Americans Burn in Hell and other books. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. He is also the co-founder and editor of We Heard You Like Books.

Saturday, June 1: Anne Lesley Selcer & Tom Comitta

In celebration of Anne Lesley Selcer’s new book

Blank Sign Book: Eleven Essays on Beauty, Invisibility, Formlessness, Abjection, and Political Emotion

Published by Wolfman Books

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Saturday, June 1

Doors 7:30pm

Event 8pm

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Blank Sign Book is a collection of essays on art, artists, beauty, and politics by the poet and art writer, Anne Lesley Selcer. A selection of Selcer’s ranging expositions and guided interrogations into the communicative gestures of art, the book navigates the maelstrom of image-rich contemporary culture through the work of Ana Mendieta, The Otolith Group, Juliana Huxtable, Dolores Dorantes, Janet Cardiff, Ragnar Kjartansson, and more.

Rooted in the work of feminist, queer, and postcolonial cultural theorists from Susan Sontag to Saidiya Hartman to Lisa Robertson and Micha Cárdenas, the essays consider protest, Afro-pessimism, gentrification, spectacle, trauma, beauty, surveillance, gender, the agora, and the artist's place in political change. They explore questions of beauty’s relevance to revolt, resonance as a modality of undermining power, and art’s capacity to reflect and subvert communal and generational trauma. With lyricism, incisive clarity and a deep commitment to the power of art and artists as a vehicle for experimental advocacy and radical insight, Blank Sign Book displays Selcer’s capacious and assiduous grasp as an art writer and cultural thinker to be read for decades to come.

~

Tom Comitta is the author of ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread) and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), a digital and print archive of the 40 books he produced in four years. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Fence, BAX 2020 and New American Writing, with two poems in The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing), an international anthology surveying the “rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.” He is currently at work on a collage novel, The Nature Book.

May 25: Zachary Oberzan's The Great Pretender

This Saturday night, 951 Chung King Road once again opens its doors and lends its venue to a new screening series programmed by Nick Toti. This installment will feature the U.S. premiere of "the greatest movie that never should have been made by the greatest filmmaker you've never heard of": Zachary Oberzan's The Great Pretender.

The Great Pretender could be conveniently described as an unauthorized remake of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up, but it is actually much, much more than that: an examination of the absurdities of fame and creativity, a concert by an Elvis impersonator, and a guided meditation through the dark corner's of Oberzan's neuroses. It is the type of movie that descriptions can do no justice, so come witness it for yourself!

 

* * *

Saturday, May 25th, 2019

Doors open at 7:30pm; screening begins at 8:00pm

951 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA

Free and open to all

Saturday, May 18: Adam Tedesco, Amie Zimmerman, Natalie Graham & Librecht Baker

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

ADAM TEDESCO
AMIE ZIMMERMAN
NATALIE GRAHAM
& LIBRECHT BAKER

Saturday, May 18 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Poet and video artist Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His video work has been screened at MoMA PS1, &Now: A Festival of Innovative Writing, No Nation Gallery, and the New Hampshire Poetry Festival, among other venues. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Fanzine, Fence, Gramma, jubilat, Laurel Review, Powderkeg, Prelude, and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently ABLAZA (Lithic Press, 2017), ISO 8601:2004 (Really Serious Literature, 2018), and Misrule (Ursus Americanus, 2019). His first full-length poetry collection, Mary Oliver, was published by Lithic Press in February.

Amie Zimmerman lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Salt Hill, and Puerto del Sol, among others. She has two chapbooks, Oyster (Reality Beach) and Compliance (Essay Press), is events coordinator for YesYes Books, and runs the reading series "family portrait."

A native of Gainesville, Florida, Natalie Graham earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida and Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, New England Review, Valley Voices: A Literary Review, and Southern Humanities Review; and her articles have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture and Transition. She is a Cave Canem fellow and associate professor of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. BEGIN WITH A FAILED BODY, her first full-length collection of poems, won the 2016 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

librecht baker is the author of vetiver (Finishing Line Press), an English Professor, and a Sundress Publications' Assistant Editor. She's part of The Vagrancy’s 2018-2019 Playwrights’ Group and was part of the Eastside Queer Stories Festival 2019. baker has attended Ragdale, VONA/Voices, and Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat. She has a MFA from Goddard College. Her poetry appears in Solace: Writing Refuge, & LGBTQ Women of Color, Bone Bouquet (Issue 8.1), Sinister Wisdom 107 - Black Lesbians: We are the Revolution!, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, and other publications. baker's full-length play, “Taciturn Beings,” will received a stage reading on May 18th at 4 PM, in Los Angeles, as part of Vagrancy Theatre’s BLOSSOMING: A N

Friday, May 10th: Zhu Zhu: Readings from The Wild Great Wall

Chinese poet Zhu Zhu joins the Poetic Research Bureau in LA’s Chinatown for an evening of modernist poetry, drawn from his latest book, The Wild Great Wall. 

In the words of author Srikanth Reddy, The Wild Great Wall “will introduce American readers to a singular poetic consciousness adrift in modernity.”

Translated from the Chinese by Dong Li. 

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 7:30.

Sunday, May 5, 3pm: Samuel Ace & Ali Liebegott

Samuel Ace is a trans and genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, including Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish Books, 2019) and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College and divides his time between western Massachusetts and Tucson, Arizona.

Ali Liebegott has published four books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching!, and The Summer of Dead Birds. She is the recipient of a Peabody Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and a Ferro-Grumley Award. She has read and performed her work throughout the United States and Canada with the legendary queer literary tour Sister Spit. In collaboration with Michelle Tea and Elizabeth Pickens she created The RADAR LAB, a free queer writer's retreat from 2009-2013. In 2010 she took a train trip across America to interview poets for a project called The Heart has many Doors--. She currently lives in Los Angeles and writes for TV.

* * *

Sunday May 5
Doors open 2:30pm
Reading at 3pm

951 Chung King Rd

Always free. 

Saturday, April 27: Mark Francis Johnson, Kate Robinson & Tom Trudgeon

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

MARK FRANCIS JOHNSON
KATE ROBINSON
& TOM TRUDGEON

Saturday, April 27 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Mark Francis Johnson lives in Philadelphia. His antiquarian bookshop, Hiding Place, hosts a poetry reading series now in its ninth year. His latest books are HOW TO FLIT (Roof: 2018) and CAN OF HUMAN HEAT (Golias Books: 2017). With designer Jonathan Gorman and poet Andy Martrich, he has just launched a new press -Hiding Press- specializing in both contemporary experimental writing and reissues of neglected & unknown poetry.

Kate Robinson is sometimes Kate Beckwith, or, Kate Robinson Beckwith, or, really she's always all of those things, and refuses to choose one. She's an intermedia book artist and writer living in Oakland, CA where she is 1/3 of Dogpark Publishing Collective. Her book This Woman's Work is forthcoming on Gauss PDF

Tom Trudgeon is a poet and artist from Northridge, California. His work can be found in Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press), Gauss PDF, and other places. He’s shown visual work in galleries around Los Angeles including Actual Size, LACA, and Monte Vista, and most recently at Pe.Hu Gallery in Osaka, Japan. He is starting a press, Earth Book, later this year with the publication of works by Cosmo Spinosa.

Thursday, April 25: RAD! Residencies with Gillian Osborne & Michelle Detorie

Gillian Osborne
& Michelle Detorie

Lichen Writing, so in [?!***!?]

~

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid at the Poetic Research Bureau, RAD! Residencies is a new critical-creative literary event series.

~


Gillian Osborne is a writer and educator based in Santa Barbara, California. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Boom!, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, Volt, and Zyzzyva, and she's written essays and reviews for The Believer, The Boston Review, and other venues. She’s the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Green Green Green from Nightboat Books (2020) and the co-editor, with Angela Hume of a collection of critical essays, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (University of Iowa North American Poetry Series). As a scholar, her work has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson International Society, and featured in collections on The New Melville Studies and The New Dickinson Studies, both out from Cambridge University Press in the spring of 2019. She teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, and at the Harvard Extension School, where, with Elisa New, she is an instructor for a series of online courses covering 400 years of American poetry.

Michelle Detorie is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, time-based poetry, and curates the public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, was released with Ahsahta Press in late 2014. The Sin in Wilderness, a book-length visual poem about love, animals, and affective geography, is forthcoming from Dusie press. She is currently at work on a collection of prose pieces called FERAL PLANETS.
http://michelledetorie.com/
~

With generous support from the CalArts Alumnx Council Seed Grant.

Friday, April 19: Ally Harris, Lucy Blagg, Josh Fadem, Giulia Bencivenga

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

ALLY HARRIS
LUCY BLAGG
JOSH FADEM
& GIULIA BENCIVENGA

Friday, April 19 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Ally Harris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Dispersal (The Song Cave, 2019), Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings) and floor baby (dancing girl press). She’s had poems published in The Volta, Sink Review, Denver Quarterly, BOAAT Press, Entropy Magazine, and Bennington Review and is the poetry editor of Submission Reading Series, based out of Portland, OR.

Lucy Blagg is a writer and artist from Los Angeles. With Lainey Racah, she started Los Angeles Archival Poetry Project (LAPP). Her chapbook, Semi Fleshy, was published by n0 eg0 p0ems in May 2016.

Josh Fadem is an actor and comedian from Tulsa, OK. He has lived and worked in Los Angeles for 19 years. He will be reading some short stories from his upcoming book of short stories and drawings.

Giulia Bencivenga is the author of the chapbook Spacing Out. Her latest books include Unreasonable Whole (Gauss PDF, 2019) and Maniac (Inpatient Press, 2019). She hosts a monthly reading series called Two Snake out of her home in East Hollywood.

Sunday, April 14: Ben Fama, Rachel Rabbit White, Anton Ivanov & Ted Dodson

Co-hosted by Sophia Le Fraga

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Saturday, April 13: Francesca Capone, Elaine Kahn & Kristin George Bagdanov

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

FRANCESCA CAPONE
ELAINE KAHN
& KRISTIN GEORGE BAGDANOV\

Saturday, April 13 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Francesca Capone is a visual artist, writer, and textile designer. She is currently represented by Nationale in Portland, OR. Her books Woven Places (Some Other Books, 2018), Text means Tissue (2017), and Weaving Language (2015, information as material 2018) focus on textile poetics. They are available for purchase via Printed Matter, and are available for viewing at the MoMA library. She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Andrea Zittel's A-Z West. More of her published work can be found at Gauss PDF, Tunica Magazine, and in The New Concrete from Hayward Press. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Reed College, University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others.

Elaine Kahn is the author of Women in Public (City Lights, 2015). Work has appeared in Frieze, Brooklyn Rail, Jubilat, Poetry Foundation, Art Papers, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and teaches at Pomona College and the Poetry Field School. A new book, Romance or The End, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press.

Kristin George Bagdanov earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Colorado State University and is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at U.C. Davis. Her poems have recently appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto Del Sol, and other journals. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Fossils in the Making, was published this spring by Black Ocean. Her chapbook Diurne, which won the 2019 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in summer 2019. She is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine. More at kristingeorgebagdanov.com or @KristinGeorgeB.

Friday, April 12: Benjamin Lord Performance & Book Launch

BENJAMIN LORD

"IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION 

DISINTEGRATING 

OR RECONSTITUTING?"

~

Performance & Book Launch

Friday, April 12, 2019

Doors 7:30pm
Event 8pm

We celebrate the launch of Benjamin Lord’s new artist book Is Western Civilization Disintegrating or Reconstituting?. The book explores narratives of cultural formation, identity, and aesthetics through the writings of the anthropologist and psychoanalyst Alfred Kroeber. A performance by the artist will inaugurate the work.

~

Benjamin Lord’s work spans the techniques of photography, video, drawing, and sculpture, with a particular regard for the relationship between photography and the poetics of fiction. In addition to his gallery practice, he regularly creates editions of artist books. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the Brooklyn Museum. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from UCLA.

Thursday, April 11: RAD! Residencies with Gillian Osborne & Laura Vena

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

~

Gillian Osborne is a writer and educator based in Santa Barbara, California. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Boom!, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, Volt, and Zyzzyva, and she's written essays and reviews for The Believer, The Boston Review, and other venues. She’s the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Green Green Green from Nightboat Books (2020) and the co-editor, with Angela Hume of a collection of critical essays, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (University of Iowa North American Poetry Series). As a scholar, her work has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson International Society, and featured in collections on The New Melville Studies and The New Dickinson Studies, both out from Cambridge University Press in the spring of 2019. She teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, and at the Harvard Extension School, where, with Elisa New, she is an instructor for a series of online courses covering 400 years of American poetry.

Laura Vena is a writer, editor, translator, and animal activist whose work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Super Arrow, Tarpaulin Sky, In Posse Review, The Dirty Fabulous, Antennae and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 1913 Press First Book Prize by John Keene for her book, x/she: stardraped. Laura holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Critical Studies from CalArts and is interested in works of a fantastic nature and those that investigate the ethical and aesthetic considerations of representation. She is Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Two If By Sea Press, Fiction Editor at Entropy Magazine, and Founder of Blockhead Brigade, an organization that helps Pit Bull type dogs & their families in need.

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The pragmatics:

Three separate evenings at the Poetic Research Bureau focused around an issue or idea that the writer brings to the residency. The events are in the spirit of a collaborative poetics involving the community that is emerging through the residency.

Part One: A reading and conversation and more, we pair the writer with someone.
Part Two: A reading and conversation, writers pair themselves with someone.
Part Three: A collaborative community event – workshop, experimental lecture, or performance.

Writers who bring a question or theme to work with, writers who want to think publicly with others about a question or theme, writers working on new projects, writers working on continuing projects, writers who might use the occasion to generate something entirely new!

~

In RAD! Residency – Gillian Osborne: Lichen Writing, so in [?!***!?]

Part One – Thursday, April 11: Gillian Osborne & Laura Vena

Part Two – Thursday, April 25: Gillian Osborne & Michelle Detoire

Part Three – Friday, April 26: Gillian Osborne and lichen wildness tba!

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With generous support from the CalArts Alumnx Council Seed Grant.