Elizabeth Hall, Myriam Gurba & Wendy C. Ortiz

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

A book release party for Elizabeth Hall's new book

from Tarpaulin Sky Press

I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris

ELIZABETH HALL

MYRIAM GURBA

& WENDY C. ORTIZ

Saturday, July 9 2016

7:30pm

~

Elizabeth Hall was born in Louisiana and raised in Georgia. She is the author of the book I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and the chapbook Two Essays (eohippus labs). She currently lives in San Pedro, California where she plays bass with the band Pine Family.

A native Californian, Myriam Gurba earned a BA with honors from UC Berkeley. Her first book, Dahlia Season, won the Publishing Triangle's Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is also the author of Wish You Were Me (Future Tense), menudo & Herb (self-published), and A White Girl Named Shaquanda (self-published). She blogs at lesbrain and often for The Rumpus and Radar Productions.

Wendy C. Ortiz is a Los Angeles native. She is the author of EXCAVATION: A MEMOIR (Future Tense Books, 2014), HOLLYWOOD NOTEBOOK (Writ Large Press, 2015), and the forthcoming BRUJA (Civil Coping Mechanisms, late 2016). She wrote the year-long, monthly column "On the Trail of Mary Jane" about medical marijuana dispensary culture in Southern California for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Wendy was co-founder and curator of the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series between 2001 and 2015.

~

Poetic Research Bureau 

951 Chung King Rd. 

Chinatown 

Los Angeles, CA

900012

Brandon Drew Holmes, Amanda-Faye Jimenez & Miles Preston-Clark

Brandon Drew Holmes is the only son of Mia Vaughn and Baskerville Holmes. He makes work about white people for Black people.

Amanda-Faye Jimenez is a writer who lives in Los Angeles, but does not have a web-series yet. Her rejection letter from the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship said her application stood out as one of the stronger submissions. She's totally going to submit again next year, but in the meantime she's going to continue writing, entertaining her 800+ Facebook friends almost daily with her astute observations, and letting her dogs kiss her on the mouth even though everyone keeps telling her that's some white people shit. amandafayejimenez.com

Miles Preston-Clark is a Black writer and interdisciplinary artist from Georgia. His writing has been published in Hobart, Spork Press, Pioneertown, Reality Hands, Wu-Wei Magazine and elsewhere.milesprestonclark.com 

~

Friday, June 17th

7:30pm

~

Poetic Research Bureau 

951 Chung King Rd. 

Chinatown 

Los Angeles, CA

900012

@SEA #8: "CURSES" w/ Kraning, Moriarty, Sequeira & White

The eighth edition of @SEA, the Poetic Research Bureau's monthly live magazine, concludes its spring season with a calling down of the theme of curses: bad luck, bad lots, hexes and misfortune; low speech, profanities, brought down trouble and malediction. A quartet of ensorcellement at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown! 

@SEA #8: Curses! @ Poetic Research Bureau
Sunday, June 5, 2016 – Doors open at 1pm

Event 1:30-3:30pm is free.

• SCREENING: Devil's Gate, a film by Laura Kraning
• TALK:  “Ensorcellment and Hex in Robert Duncan’s Poetics” by Laura Moriarty
• READING: Jessica Sequeira, fiction and recent translations of Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia) and Sara Gallardo (Argentina)
• PERFORMANCE: Ben White presents the performance ritual *Take Away Their Victory*

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, such as New York, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Antimatter, Visions du Réel, and Festival du Nouveau Cinema, among others.  Laura currently teaches in the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts. Tracing the metaphysical undercurrents of a Southern California landscape scarred by fire, her film Devil's Gate unearths a subconscious of the landscape, as the echoes of the past reverberate in the present and infect our perception and experience of place.

Laura Moriarty lives in the East Bay. Her recent books are Fugitive Notebook from Couch Press, Who That Divines and A Tonalist, from Nightboat, A Semblance, Selected Poetry 1976-2007 from Omnidawn and the novel Ultravioleta from Atelos. She has taught at Mills College, Naropa University and elsewhere and is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution.  

Jessica Sequeira, originally from California, attended Harvard and Cambridge, and now lives in Buenos Aires. She has published essays, stories and translations in The Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Modern Poetry in Translation, Berfrois, Litro Magazine, Palabras Errantes, The Missing Slate, Ventana Latina and other publications. Her version of the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's short stories will be published by Dalkey Archive Press later this year, and her collection of Bolivian poetry is out with Smokestack Books in 2017. 

Ben White is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and is host of art and culture show "The People" on KCHUNG radio 1630AM. Take Away Their Victory is a performance exercise in ancient world curses and binding spells, and will allow an opportunity for viewers to ostracize a member of the Los Angeles community for ten years.

  

Saturday, June 4: Amiri Baraka's Sound

AMIRI BARAKA'S SOUND

After Mingus: Improvising the Mingus School

 

Harmony Holiday continues the evenings of deep listening, screenings, and expansive talk with After Mingus: Improvising the Mingus School – prototyping, improvising, riffing on the concept of a Mingus School – "an open interdisciplinary workshop akin to Mingus' own jazz workshop." 

Saturday night we celebrate the sound recordings of Amiri Baraka.

Continuing the series. Minimal prep, open ears.

Organized and presented by Harmony Holiday

with the Poetic Research Bureau

Saturday, June 4th
7:30pm

Donate and receive a complimentary copy of
S O S: Poems 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka
published and provided by Grove Press

$5 - 10 sliding scale donation

The Poetic Research Bureau is a 501(c)(3) organization. All donations are tax deductible.

Saturday, May 28: Zack Haber & Ara Shirinyan

Please join the Poetic Research Bureau Saturday, May 28h at 7:30pm as we welcome Zack Haber from Oakland and Ara Shirinyan from Los Angeles.

Zack Haber is an organizer of poetics who lives in Oakland and grew up in Virginia. He is the author of if you want to be one of them playing in the streets… (quiet lightning, 2014). He’s organized The Other Fabulous Reading Series since 2012. Some of his recent writing has appeared in DataBleedZine, The Capalino Review, 580 Split, Elderly, Moss Trill, and Textsound. He’s writing a book about horrible places.

Ara Shirinyan is a poet and teacher from Los Angeles. Formerly co-director of the Poetic Research Bureau, he has written several books, including Syria Is In The World, Handsome Fish Offices and Your Country Is Great.

* * *

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Chinatown
Los Angeles, CA

900012

Saturday, May 14: Marco Antonio Huerta & Marcel Alcalá

Marco Antonio Huerta: Mexican translator and poet. Won the Northeast Regional Poetry Award in 2005. Author of the poetry collections: La semana milagrosa (Conarte, 2006), Golden Boy (Letras de Pasto Verde, 2009), Hay un jardín (Tierra Adentro, 2009). Magnitud/e (Gusanos de la nada, 2012) is a poem-in-progress written together with Sara Uribe and translated into English by John Pluecker. His work has been published in several periodicals and anthologies in Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, and the United States. Currently Huerta is a student at the MFA in Writing program at UC San Diego.

Marcel Alcala (b. 1990 in Santa Ana, CA) creates events and encounters that upend the expectation of art as a discrete work exhibited for a specific period of time. Often collaborating with artists and specialists in fields such as science, literature, film, music, and architecture, Alcala ventures outside of institutional structures to contextualize his work in public space. Alcala’s diverse practice includes performance, live situations, installations, objects, and drawings. He graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Here, he organizes performance/poetry exhibitions at the McDonalds on Sunset in Silverlake, researches and enacts "Clown" performances around the country, does Improv in real time called CNX2 (Creating New Content Now), and writes poetry on identity politics and the future/status of the "brown" body. Like the socially necessary figure of the clown that fascinates him, Alcala uses humor, play, and the absurd to critique the extremes and everyday banalities of societal power.

 * * *

Saturday, May 14, 20116

Doors open 7pm. Event at 7:30pm.

Poetic Research Bureau 

951 Chung King Road

Chinatown, Los Angeles

Friday, May 6th 7:30pm: Angélica Freitas, Hilary Kaplan & Kit Schluter

 

 

Angélica Freitas is the author of two books of poetry, Rilke Shake and Um útero é do tamanho de um punho ( The uterus is the size of a fist, a finalist for the 2013 Portugal Telecom Prize), and a graphic novel, Guadalupe. Her poems have appeared in Granta, The White Review, and elsewhere. She co-edits the journal Modo de Usar & Co., and lives in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Hilary Kaplan is the translator of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Best Translated Book Award in poetry, and Ghosts, a collection of stories by Paloma Vidal. Her translations of Brazilian poetry and prose have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in journals internationally. The recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, she has translated poets including Claudia Roquette-Pinto, Ricardo Domeneck, and Marília Garcia, and is currently translating Angélica Freitas's The uterus is the size of a fist. She lives in Los Angeles.

Kit Schluter is translator of The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwob, The Cold by Jaime Saenz, and Circle of Dogs by Amandine André (in collaboration with J. Spaar), among others forthcoming. His personal work can be found in BOMB, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a 2016 NEA translation fellow, for continued work on Marcel Schwob. He lives in Oakland, CA, & co-edits O'clock Press.

 

 

* * *

 

Doors open at 7pm.

 

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Chinatown
Los Angeles, CA

900012