the Poetry Project Podcast

Monday Reading Series

Lauren Levin grew up in New Orleans and lives in Richmond, CA with her family. Her first full-length book The Braid is forthcoming with Krupskaya Books in October 2016. Recent work can be found in the chapbook Only the Dead Are Never Anxious (Mondo Bummer), in the journal Open House, and forthcoming in the journal Hold.

Eric Sneathen splits his time between Oakland and UC Santa Cruz, where he is a PhD student in Literature. His poetry has been published by Mondo Bummer, littletell, Faggot Journal, and The Equalizer, and his first collection, Snail Poems, is forthcoming from Krupskaya. He is also the editor and producer of Macaroni Necklace, a DIY literary zine and reading series featuring (mostly) writers who have not yet published a book-length manuscript.

This event is a part of the “GIANT NIGHT: The Poetry Project at 50” platform series.

Participants will answer some or none of the following half-questions: What’s it mean for The Poetry Project to be The Poetry Project right now, in the East Village, in 2016, which is or was considered “downtown” at points? Is “downtown” a sign, a sigh, a thing, an active nothing, or a something else? Can we have a retrospective season and dissolve nostalgia at the same time? Is there anyone out there listening at all? (If so, peace). Do poets in this town still need real physical centers to go experience the work out front? And what does “need” mean? And what does “real physical centers” mean? And what does “out front” mean? Event will be followed by a mellow reception in lieu of a Q&A. Curated by Anselm Berrigan and hosted by Stacy Szymaszek. With John Godfrey, Ariel Goldberg, Erica Hunt, Sophia Le Fraga, John Yau, and Steve Zultanski.

Wednesday Reading Series

Keith Waldrop is the author of Selected Poems (Omnidawn 2016), Transcendental Studies (U of California Press, National Book Award 2009), and more than a dozen other books of poems. He has also published a novel, Light While There Is Light (Dalkey Archive), a book of collages, Several Gravities (Siglio), and translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and Poems in Prose as well as contemporary French authors Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Jean Grosjean etc. He is retired from teaching at Brown University and, with Rosmarie Waldrop, edits Burning Deck Press in Providence, RI.

Rosmarie Waldrop’s most recent books are Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, and Driven to Abstraction (New Directions). Her novels, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All, are now available in one volume from Northwestern UP; her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), from U of Alabama Press. She has translated 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès’s work (her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, is out from Wesleyan UP) as well as books by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Peter Waterhouse, Gerhard Rühm, etc. With Keith Waldrop, she edits Burning Deck Press.

Friday Reading Series

Vi Khi Nao holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, drawings, and poems have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Glimmer Train, NOON, and Ploughshares. She is the author of two novellas, Swans In Half-Mourning (2013) and The Vanishing Point of Desire (2011), and her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her manuscript, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, won the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. In Fall 2016, Coffee House Press will publish her novel Fish in Exile. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Jayson P. Smith is a writer, editor, & educator. Their poems & interviews appear in journals such as fields magazine, The Offing, Day One, The Rumpus, & boundary2. Jayson has been the recipient of fellowships from The Conversation, Millay Colony for the Arts, & Callaloo as well as scholarships from Cave Canem & The New Harmony Writers’ Workshop. Jayson is currently a Mentor at Urban Word NYC & Creative Director for The Other Black Girl Collective. Jayson lives in Brooklyn and at www.jaysonpsmith.com.

Wednesday Reading Series

Myung Mi Kim’s books include Penury (Omnidawn), Commons (University of California Press), DURA (Sun & Moon and Nightboat Books), The Bounty (Chax Press), and Under Flag (Kelsey Street Press), winner of The Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award of Merit. Her fellowships and honors include awards from the Fund for Poetry, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry, and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. Kim is a Professor of English and Director of the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo.

Juliana Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers. She has edited, with Stephanie Young, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack, Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine, American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan U P, 2002). Her most recent book is That Winter the Wolf Came from Commune Editions.

Monday Reading Series

It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?: Writing in the Shadow of Human Extinction

This evening, consisting of readings, screenings and discussion will focus on the question of writing in the late anthropocene. With the question of major shifts in global climate, foodways and migration patterns, and the potential for major political and economic upheaval, this event will pose questions about writing’s contemporary role and the ways it is being reshaped by the presence of these world-altering forces. The evening will feature writers and artists Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva, poets Evelyn Reilly and Adjua Greaves, and filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil and their focuses ranging from ecocide and genetically modified organisms to indigenous counternarratives of “the end” and the survivability and “mattering,” in philosopher Judith Butler’s terms, of writing.

Wednesday Reading Series

Garrett Caples is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including the brand-new Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016). He has also written a book of essays, Retrievals (Wave, 2014), and a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (Wave, 2010). He co-edited Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems by Frank Lima (City Lights, 2016), Particulars of Place by Richard O. Moore (Omnidawn, 2015), and Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (California, 2013). A freelance writer, he is also an editor at City Lights, where he curates the Spotlight poetry series. He lives in San Francisco.

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington DC area, Hoa Nguyen currently makes her home in Toronto. Her poetry collections include As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots from Wave Books. Nguyen teaches at Ryerson University, for Miami University’s low residency MFA program, for the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and in a long-running, private poetics workshop. She can be found on the web at http://www.hoa-nguyen.com.

Monday Reading Series

Anaïs Duplan is the author of Take This Stallion. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in/on: Hyperallergic, Boston Review, The Journal, FENCE, PBS Newshour, the Ploughshares blog, Asymptote Journal’s blog, and other places. She directs the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program in Iowa City where she is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Christopher Soto aka Loma (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. He was named one of “10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know” by Remezcla. He was named one of “30 Poets You Should Be Reading” by The Literary Hub. He was named one of “7 Trans & Gender Non-Conforming Artist Doing the Work” by the Offing. Poets & Writers honored Christopher Soto with the “Barnes & Nobles Writer for Writers Award” in 2016. Christopher Soto’s first chapbook “Sad Girl Poems” was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. His work has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration. He founded Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation and cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign. He interned at the Poetry Society of America and received an MFA in poetry from NYU.

Friday Reading Series

Join us in the Parish Hall for bilingual readings in Spanish and English with authors and translators from the Señal Series, featuring: Luis Felipe Fabre (with translation by John Pluecker), Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (reading Sor Juana), Pablo Katchadjian (with Rebekah Smith), and Florencia Castellano (with translation by Alexis Almeida). Señal Series (founded in 2015) is a co-publication between BOMB Magazine, Libros Antena Books, and Ugly Duckling Presse, that publishes two chapbooks a year, linked either thematically, conceptually, or trans-historically, troubling received ideas around what the terms “contemporary” and “Latin America” might represent.

Wednesday Reading Series

Todd Colby has published six books of poetry. His latest book, Splash State, was published by The Song Cave in 2014. Todd’s most recent poetry and art have appeared in Poetry, Columbia: a journal of literature and art, Denver Quarterly, and Brooklyn Rail. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adam Fitzgerald is a poet, editor, essayist and educator. In 2013, his first book of poems The Late Parade was hailed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review as “a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry.” He serves as contributing editor for Literary Hub and curates monthly poetry features. Recent poems can be found in Poetry, The New Yorker, BOMB, Granta, and elsewhere. In 2014, with poets Dorothea Lasky and Timothy Donnelly he co-founded The Home School. He teaches at Rutgers University and New York University and this spring at Poets House. His newest book of poems, George Washington, was just published by W. W. Norton’s historic Liveright imprint in September.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016) and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002; reprinted 2013). He lives in New York City, where he curates “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” at Dia:Chelsea. Raphael Rubinstein has characterized Katz as “A 21st-century flâneur whose wanderings range from the sidewalks and subways of New York City to the crowded beaches of Rio de Janeiro.”