Saturday, June 30: Feliz Lucia Molina & Precious Okoyomon

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

FELIZ LUCIA MOLINA
& PRECIOUS OKOYOMON

Saturday, June 30

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

*Chinatown Summer Nights will be happening on the same night. Parking might be tough--please consider alternative forms of transportation.

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Feliz Lucia Molina is the author of Undercastle (Magic Helicopter Press), a co-author of The Wes Letters (Outpost19), Roulette (forthcoming from Make Now Books), and chapbook Crystal Marys (Scary Topiary Press). Her writing has appeared in Open Space, Fence, PEN America, Night Papers, and others. She can be found at felizluciamolina.com

Precious Okoyomon is a queer poet, artist, performer, alien, living in new york. Her writing has been performed and exhibited at the Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Exo Exo in Paris, Artist Space and MoMA PS1 and published in The Iowa Review, Lambia Literary, New York Tyrant and Best American Experimental Writing.

Saturday, June 23: Us & Them, a Writer-Translator Reading Series

Us&Them LA, hosted by DAVID SHOOK at the POETIC RESEARCH BUREAU, will feature:

MAGDALENA EDWARDS reading CLARICE LISPECTOR from BRAZIL,

ALANA MARIE LEVINSON-LABROSSE reading ABDULLA PASHEW from KURDISTAN,

ANDRÉ NAFFIS SAHELY reading FRANKÉTIENNE from HAITI,

and

ELISA WOUK ALMINO reading ANA MARTINS MARQUES from BRAZIL.

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Us&Them is normally a Brooklyn-based reading series that gives literary translators with parallel careers as writers a place to showcase both sides of their work. Readings are typically hosted four times a year at Molasses Books in Bushwick, but have also taken place in Havana, Oakland, and now right here in beautiful Los Angeles!

MAGDALENA EDWARDS is a Chilean-born writer, translator, and actor. Her new translation of Clarice Lispector's second novel The Chandelier (New Directions) has been widely praised in the New York Times and many other publications. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, The Millions, and El Mercurio. She is now writing a manuscript titled “In the Name of the Body: Traveling with Elizabeth Bishop, Clarice Lispector, and Raúl Zurita.”

ALANA MARIE LEVINSON-LABROSSE is a poet, translator, and professor who has worked in Iraq since 2011. Handful of Salt (The Word Works, 2016) introduced Kajal Ahmad’s poetry to English. The Dictionary of Midnight: Selected Poems of Abdulla Pashew is forthcoming from Phoneme Media. Poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, Bengal Lights, Epiphany, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, and Words Without Borders.

ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY's first collection is The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction and poetry from French and Italian, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Rashid Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdellatif Laâbi. His latest translation is Alessandro Spina's The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I (Arcade Publishing, 2018).

ELISA WOUK ALMINO is a writer, editor, and translator from Portuguese. Her writing and translations have appeared in Asymptote Journal, Guernica Magazine, The Nation, the Paris Review Daily, and Words Without Borders, among other places. She translated a collection of poetry by the Brazilian poet Ana Martins Marques in the book This House, published in 2017 by Scrambler Books. She is the Senior Los Angeles Editor of Hyperallergic and a co-editor of harlequin creature's new online translation platform.

Sunday, June 27: Trevor Joyce, Jason Magabo Perez & David Lloyd

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

TREVOR JOYCE
JASON MAGABO PEREZ
& DAVID LLOYD

Sunday, May 27 2018

Doors 3:30pm
Event 4pm

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Trevor Joyce is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including the collections with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (2001), What’s in Store (2008), Rome’s Wreck (2014) and Fastness (2017). The latter two books are “translations from the English” of the Elizabethan poet and colonial official and settler in Ireland, Edmund Spenser. Joyce is also a translator from Irish, Chinese, and other languages: some of his Irish translations are collected in Courts of Air and Earth (2008). A volume of essays on his work, Essays on the Poetry of Trevor Joyce, edited by Niamh O’Mahony, appeared in 2015. Joyce is the co-founder of the New Writer’s Press in Dublin and the annual SoundEye Festival of poetry in Cork.

Jason Magabo Perez is the author of two hybrid collections of poetry and prose: the chapbook, Phenomenology of Superhero (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016); and the recently published full-length debut This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017). Perez also wrote and performed two multimedia theatre-performance works: The Passion of El Hulk Hogancito (2009); and You Will Gonna Go Crazy (2011); the latter of which was funded by an NEA Challenge America Grant. An alumnus of the VONA Writing Workshops for Writers of Color, Perez holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Consciousness from New College of California and a dual Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies and Communication from University of California, San Diego. Currently, Perez is an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino.

David Lloyd is a writer and critic, born in Ireland and currently living in Los Angeles and teaching at the University of California, Riverside. Arc & Sill: Poems 1979-2009 (2012) collects his new and selected poetry. A bilingual French/English edition of his play, The Press, is forthcoming from Nouvelles Scènes at the Presses Universitaires du Midi in 2018. Kodalith, a sequence of poems, is @ Smithereens Press, http://www.smithereenspress.com/. He is the editor of Cusp Books, a chap-book press based in Los Angeles.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

STACEY TRAN
AMANDA CHOO QUAN
& ANA CECILIA ALVAREZ

Saturday, May 26 2018

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

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Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, identity. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and diaCRITICS. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018).

Amanda Choo Quan is a Trinidadian-Jamaican writer, performer and organizer currently based in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she earned the Brodber-Pollard prize, and of CalArts' MFA in Creative Writing, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She has attended Callaloo and Cropper Foundation workshops, the Juniper Summer Institute, and the Scottish Universities Summer International School. She was most recently awarded a REEF/CalArts residency. Her work can be seen in Callaloo, Entropy, or on various stages across Los Angeles.

Ana Cecilia Alvarez is an essayist and poet born in Mexico City and raised in southern Florida.​ ​Her​ ​writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Inquiry and Real Life.​ ​​She​ ​edited Adult, a magazine of new erotics, and taught Sx-Ed, a communication-based, pleasure-oriented, and politically engaged course at BHQFU.​ ​​Alvarez is a recent graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at CalArts and is at work on a collection of poetry and a nonfiction manuscript about ghosts, plants, colonialism, and mothers​.​

Friday, May 25: Stella Corso, Zack Haber & Giulia Bencivenga

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

STELLA CORSO
ZACK HABER
& GIULIA BENCIVENGA

Friday, May 25 2018

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Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

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Stella Corso is a writer and performer living in Brooklyn. Her first book of poems, TANTRUM, was selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2016 Black Box Prize for Poetry and recently published by Rescue Press.

Zack Haber is an organizer of poetics. Some of his work can be found in Datableed Zine, Armed Cell, The Capalino Review, 580 Split, The Elephants, Sierra Nevada Review and other places. His little book, if you want to be one of them playing in the streets…, was published in 2014 by Quiet Lightning and Tiny Splendor. He’s hosted poetry readings and performances through The Other Fabulous Reading Series and other projects in the Bay Area since 2012. He works at Martin Luther King Elementary School in West Oakland. He’s currently writing a book called Horrible Places.

Giulia Bencivenga is the author of the chapbook Spacing Out. Formerly the editor of the Bay-based magazine See You Next Tuesday, she is currently the guest editor for MISTRESS. She hosts a monthly reading series called Two Snake out of her home in East Hollywood.

Saturday, May 19: Hillary Gravendyk's The Soluble Hour with Cynthia Arrieu-King

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

a book launch for
THE SOLUBLE HOUR
by
HILLARY GRAVENDYK
with
CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING

Doors 7:30pm

Reading 8pm

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In Hillary Gravendyk’s The Soluble Hour, the speaker sings with visionary passion how the beloved and dear ones will soon be without her and laments for their imminent grief. But being in extremis pulls the voice towards testimony of unquestioned love, a recollection of landscapes Californian and otherwise, and previous selves. The poet wields her deep solitude as the measure of truth and conviction, the self that accepts its own impermanence.

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Hillary Anne Gravendyk was born in Manhattan Beach, California on March 1, 1979, and grew up in Snoqualmie Valley, Washington State, in the town of Carnation. She attended Tulane and the University of Washington and went on to get a doctorate in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, her chapbook The Naturalist came out from Achiote Press and in 2010, her book Harm, published by Omnidawn, was a finalist for the California Writer’s Exchange Award. In 2009, she was hired to teach 20th Century poetry at Pomona College in Claremont, California. After moving to Oakland in 2003 with her husband Benjamin Burrill, Hillary lived out most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area and Claremont.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an associate professor of creative writing at Stockton College and a former Kundiman fellow. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China, Manifest and forthcoming in 2019 Continuity. She met Hillary in 2008 at the Vermont Studio Center where they became good friends. They wrote collaboratively the book Unlikely Conditions from 1913 Press, 2016.

Friday night, May 18: Jennifer Firestone & Andrew Maxwell

Jennifer Firestone was raised in San Francisco and now lives in Brooklyn. She is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program. Her books include Story (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming), Ten (BlazeVOX [Books], forthcoming) Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). Firestone co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books). Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. Firestone won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize.

Andrew Maxwell runs the Poetic Research Bureau with Joseph Mosconi in Los Angeles, where he also hosts a weekly radio show of bodega & cosmic roots music on KXLU 88.9FM, "The Dream of Harry Lime". Recent collections include Conversion Table (Mindmade Books, 2016), featuring small remarks without propositional attitudes, Candor is the Brightest Shield (Ugly Duckling, 2015), and Peeping Mot (Apogee, 2013). A selection of his aphorisms was recently on display as an LED scroll in the installation THIS KNOWN WORLD at MOCA Los Angeles.

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Hosted by Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

Poetic Research Bureau
Friday, May 18

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8:00pm