Saturday, October 20: Sandra Simonds & Geoffrey G. O'Brien

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...
SANDRA SIMONDS
& GEOFFREY G. O'BRIEN

Saturday, October 20 2018

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando, (Wave Books), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been published in the New York Times, the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s latest book is Experience in Groups (Wave, 2018). He is also the author most recently of People on Sunday (Wave, 2013) and the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets (Minus A Press, 2012). O’Brien is a Professor of English at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

Thursday, October 18: Rajnesh Chakrapani, Gabrielle Civil, Anca Roncea

Poetic Research Bureau presents...

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

RAJNESH CHAKRAPANI
GABRIELLE CIVIL
ANCA RONCEA

Thursday, October 18 2018

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8:00pm

Raj Chakrapani received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he wrote his collection of poems Brown People with Colonial Histories and his MFA thesis on Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene. He also took classes in experimental film and translation. He recently completed a series of short films that explore his family video archives and communities with shifting perspectives of home. His poems are placed or forthcoming in Lana Turner, Speculative City, Word Thug, Sequestrum and http://Crevice.ro. His films are on Triquarterly and WordThug and available on youtube. He writes interviews for The Rumpus and recently interviewed the artists SJ Sindu, Madhu Kaza and Gabrielle Civil. He is a faculty member in the Language and Thinking Faculty at Bard College.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, writer and poet, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world, including as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico. She collaborated with artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier on the image + text work “Tourist Art” and her texts and translations have appeared in Small Axe, Art21, Something on Paper, Kitchen Table Translation, Obsidian, and more. She is the author of two memoirs in performance art: Swallow the Fish (2017) and Experiments in Joy (2019) both published by CCM. She currently serves as Faculty in Critical Studies and the MFA program in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Anca Roncea is a poet and translator. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa’s M.F.A. program in Literary Translation. In 2012 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in Romania and now lives in the US where she is working on translations of Romanian poetry, an experimental translation of Tristan Tzara, as well as her first book of poetry.

Saturday, September 22: Emmalea Russo, Pascalle Burton & Katherine Coldiron

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

EMMALEA RUSSO
PASCALLE BURTON
& KATHARINE COLDIRON

Saturday, September 22

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Emmalea Russo is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living at the New Jersey coast. Using language, sculpture, and photography, she explores edge spaces in physical environments and human consciousness. She is the author of several chapbooks, most recently in collaboration with Michael Newton, Eternal Apprentice (DoubleCross Press, 2016) and an artist book entitled they (Gauss PDF, 2014). She has performed her iterative slide presentation, Units of Plexiglass, an edit, at Poets House, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Flying Object and she presented a talk on Robert Seydel at the Queens Museum. She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and an MFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute. Her first book, G, is forthcoming from Futurepoem in 2018. Her second book, Wave Archive, is forthcoming from BookThug in 2019. She was a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace program from 2016-2017.

Pascalle Burton is a poet and performer with an interest in conceptual art and cultural theory. Her collection 'About the Author is Dead' is available from Cordite Books. Projects include UN/SPOOL (with Nathan Shepherdson), 24 Hour Gym (with Tessa Rose), and performing in the band The Stress of Leisure. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, such as Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Clan Analogue, Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, Overland, Sod and V+L-A=K. For more information, visit https://pascalleburton.wordpress.com/.

Katharine Coldiron's work has appeared in Ms., the Guardian, VIDA, the Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, BUST, and elsewhere. She runs an author interview series on Entropy, "Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)", and her essay "The Girl on the Bike" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Rumpus. She lives in California and blogs at The Fictator.

Saturday, Sept 15: blake nemec, Erick Sáenz & Ash Ponders

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

ASH PONDERS (reading the work of DIANA MORÁN)
and BLAKE NEMEC
and ERICK SÁENZ

~

Saturday, September 15 2018
Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

blake nemec is a writer, teacher & sound artist who lives in Chicago. Sharing Plastic is hir hybrid poetry/fiction debut, & he has been featured in situations like the NOPF, JUPITER 88, the Red Rover Reading Series, the Rio Grande Review, Captive Genders, or the SF Queer Arts Performance Festival. He received an MFA from the UTEP and is a Lambda Literary Fellow. He has long worked as a sound recordist in queer independent movies, such as the documentary FREE CeCE! Hir work obsesses on the extraordinary musicality of everyday conversations by unprotected workers, pansexuals, & gender non-conforming people.

Panamanian poet and radical activist, Diana Morán, created her major works in the tumult of the 1960s and '70s. Despite winning the first Ricardo Miró National Literature Award for poetry, she was forced into exile as an active Marxist by the successive conservative and reformist military coups that overthrew the preceding government in the late '60s. Labeled a criminal reactionary by Torrijos and Noriega, Morán found a permanent home-in-exile in Mexico City, teaching at the Metropolitan Autonomous University. She passed away in 1987; her cremains were secretly scattered into the Panama Canal in 2004.

Panamanian multimedia artist Ash Ponders lives in the Sonoran Desert making visuals for newspapers and art galleries. His recent work has been covered by the New York Times, BBC, CNN and Teen Vogue. In his spare time he translates poems, chases hot air balloons, teaches firearms safety, and tutors adults in both Spanish and English.

Erick Sáenz is a 1st generation Latinx writer and English teacher from Los Angeles. He's the founding editor of Lilac Press, a small imprint dedicated to DIY ethics. He was previously a contributing editor for the online magazine Cheers from the Wasteland. In addition to several self-released chapbooks and zines, his writing has appeared in Entropy, Alien Mouth, Elderly Magazine, Pinball, Hobart Pulp, Five:2:One Magazine, and others. His first book SUSURROS A MI PADRE is forthcoming via The Operating System.

Saturday, September 8: Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Rodney Koeneke & Jos Charles

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI
RODNEY KOENEKE
& JOS CHARLES

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s most recent book is Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), which was recently shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. It is also the author of Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012) and Gowanus Atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), coediter of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari Edwards, as well as lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the Brooklyn-based Juan & the Pines and Oakland-based The Western Skyline. Julian is currently at work as an editor on The Apache Pollen Path (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press) with its grandmother, Inés Talamantez. It maintains a blog of handwritten poems here:https://julianspoems.tumblr.com/

Rodney Koeneke's latest book of poems, Body & Glass, is just out from Wave Books. Other collections include Etruria (Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). His work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Granta, Harper’s, Harriet, The Nation, Poetry, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. An early member of the Flarf collective, he was active in the Bay Area poetry scene until moving to Portland, Oregon in 2006, where he teaches in the History Department at Portland State University.

Jos Charles is author of feeld, a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, and Safe Space. She is a recipient of the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is pursuing a PhD in English from UC Irvine.

Friday, September 7: Carla Harryman & Deborah Meadows (with Gray Palmer)

Hosted by Harold Abramowitz & Andrea Quaid

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~


Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, performance writer and collaborator in multi-disciplinary performance. She is known for her boundary breaking investigations of genre, non/narrative poetics, and text-based performance. The influence of improvised music, electronic sampling, and collaborative practices animate her recent works. Publications from 2018 include the two volumes Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (trans. Sabine Huynh), a collection of performance writings and poet’s theater plays composed between 2001-2015 and released by PURH “To Series” in separate English and French volumes. In an interview for Décharge the author describes the work as “first an event of listening, tracking itself on the more abstract, musical plane, which carries the figurative, fanciful, philosophical, playful, drastic, and political aspects of its non/narrative.” A score for speaking voices and manual typewriters used as musical instruments was also published in a bi-lingual edition in 2018, byjoca seria, as L’Impromptu de Hannah/Hannah Cut In. Hannah Cut In premiered in performance at University Art Museum, Berkeley in 2017. Harryman’s Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. In 2012 she performed (with pianist Magda Mayas) Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a Re-performance, as the closing keynote of dOCUMENTA 13’sWhat Is Thinking program in Kassel, Germany. A current essay project focuses on arenas of hope and negativity in a durational project, “Letters Not about Hope.” A manifestation of this project is Artifact of Hope, published in Kenning Edition’s Ordinance Series in 2017. Of this work, reviewer Piotr Gwiazda comments, “As she turns philosophy into poetry, “thinking” into “making,” [Harryman] crosses many boundaries: linguistic, cultural, national, ideological, generic, disciplinary. The point for her is to retrieve something useful, even provisionally so, from the work, to make the encounter active, dialogic, even dialectical…” She was born in California, where she has spent much of her life. She currently lives in Detroit and is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. She also serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
www.carlaharryman.com

Deborah Meadows is the author of numerous books of poetry and lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District. Her recent book titled Lecture Notes: A duration poem in twelve parts is derived from public lectures at Cal Tech interleaved with excerpts from poets, artists, and thinkers and with daily news items from the day of the lecture and one item a decade later. Excerpts of her play “Dragon Boat” (to be performed at PRB with Gray Palmer) explore Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Dragon Boat traditions practiced globally and nearby in Long Beach, California. Published by Journal of Poetics Research.

Gray Palmer is a writer, composer, director, and performer based in Los Angeles. His plays have been presented by Padua Playwrights, Pharmacy, Sharon's Farm, Machine Project, and Gunfighter Nation. His one-act, Plan B, is included in You Might Be the Person I Am Talking To, from Padua Press, and his reviews and features are posted online at Stage Raw.

Saturday, August 25: Lynn Xu, Joshua Edwards, Vi Khi Nao

The Poetic Research Bureau presents:

LYNN XU
JOSHUA EDWARDS
VI KHI NAO

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Lynn Xu is the author of Debts & Lessons, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She's a professor in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago and co-edits Canarium Books.
 
Joshua Edwards is the author of several books of poetry, including Imperial Nostalgias, Architecture for Travelers, and Castles and Islands. He lives in West Texas and Chicago, where he works as a bookseller and directs Canarium Books.

Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khánh, Vietnam. She is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (1913 Press, 2017), the story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel Fish In Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014.