The Poetic Research Bureau presents...
LISA LOCASCIO
with
KATYA APEKINA
DIANA ARTERIAN
SARAH LABRIE
LISA LEE
ALLIE ROWBOTTOM
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Friday, June 21 2019
Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm
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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.
