Wednesday, January 25, 7pm – Poetry

Three Poets from Detroit

James Hart III, Anita Schmaltz, and Jhon Clark

Sunday, January 29, 7pm – Poetry
Turtleneck Press Presents
JamesTressel & Brian Warfield

“Turtleneck Press wishes to invite you to the launch of its first two chapbooks. James Tressel will be reading from his chapbook of poetry and prose, “Furnace.” Brian Warfield, founder of Turtleneck Press, will read from “Grey Inserts Himself, Like an Oven Mitt in a Top Hat,” a series of linked stories. Afterwards, Turtleneck Press wants to hear from you and will open the floor to an open mic reading of one or two poems per reader.” Turtleneck Press, turtleneckpress.com

Tuesday, January 17, 7pm – Poetry
Poets and Prophets Presents
Debrah Morkun

“I believe in near death experiences and pray to the old gods. I live in Philadelphia, where I curate The Jubilant Thicket Literary Series & co-curate (with Kim Gek Lin Short) The General Idea Series. I am the author of The Ida Pingala (BlazeVOX, 2011) & Projection Machine (BlazeVOX, 2010) as well as several chapbooks”

Friday, January 6, 7pm – Poetry
Abeer Hoque, Alex Kudera, Don Riggs

Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer with BS and MA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. She is the recipient of a 2005 Tanenbaum Award, a 2007 Fulbright Scholarship, and a 2012 NEA Literature Fellowship, and she has attended residencies at Saltonstall, VCCA, Millay, and Albee. Her writing and photography has been published in ZYZZYVA, XConnect, Nerve.com, Farafina (Nigeria), India Today, the Daily Star (Bangladesh), 580 Split, Wasafiri (England), and KQED Writers Block among others. She likes looking at gargoyles, eating at King’s Wok, and watching you dance. Philadelphia was her first home in America. See more at olivewitch.com.

Alex Kudera received his M.A. in fiction in 1998. His debut novel, Fight for Your Long Day, won the 2011 Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal for Best Fiction from the Mid-Atlantic Region. It is an original academic tragicomedy told consistently from the perspective of the adjunct instructor, and reviews and interviews can be found online at Inside Higher Ed, Academe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other locations. Many of Kudera’s stories survive in slush piles across the continent or huddled together in unheated North Philly storage space, but The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity is available as a 99-cent single wherever e-books are downloaded. Alex currently teaches writing and literature at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Don Riggs received his M.A. in poetry in 1997, after already having completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of North Carolina. He has published several articles in the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts, and is actively engaged in research and teaching in Science Fiction literature. His poetry has appeared in many publications, including 16th Century Journal, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Painted Bride Quarterly, xib and ixnay. He is the Co-Editor of and featured poet in the book Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic. He is the Editor of Lamont B. Steptoe’s A Long Movie of Shadows and translated Chinese Poetic Writing by Francois Cheng. At Drexel, Dr. Riggs teaches several courses for the Department of English and Philosophy, including Science Fiction Literature, Philosophy in Literature, Renaissance and Enlightenment Literature, Creative Writing, Visions in Writing, and Freshman Writing.

Tuesday, December 27, 5pm – Poetry
Greg Bem & Gregory Laynor

Greg Bem used to live a hearty life in Philadelphia and was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets, but then he moved to Seattle.

Gregory Laynor is living in Seattle, where he is studying and teaching at the University of Washington.

Tuesday, November 29,6pm - CANCELLED
Poets and Prophets Presents
Kimmika Williams

Saturday, November 12, 7pm – Poetry

Katie Ford, Jamaal May, Seth Pollins &  Iain Haley Pollock

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and Colosseum. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Award. Colosseum was named a “Best Book of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and one of the “Top Ten Books of Poetry of 2008” by The Virginia Quarterly. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.

Jamaal May is the author of a chapbook, The God Engine. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Bucknell University, where he is the 2011-13 Stadler Fellow. A graduate from Warren Wilson’s MFA program, May is a two-time finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, and three-time Rustbelt Slam Champion, with poems appearing in Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Blackbird, among other journals and magazines.

Seth Pollins, a writer and professional cook, lives with his wife in Ambler, a small town outside Philadelphia. He currently works at Whole Foods Market as a lively lecturer, recipe developer, and all-around food optimist. He is also a Professional Tutor at Villanova University’s Writing Center. He is currently working on a novel and is a contributing writer for the online magazine The Nervous Breakdown and the food blog, FoodVibe. He earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Iain Haley Pollock’s debut collection of poems, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Prize and appeared from University of Georgia Press earlier this year.  His work had previously appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Callaloo.  He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, where he is the Cyrus H. Nathan ’30 Distinguished Faculty Chair for English.

Wednesday, November 9, 6pm – Poetry
Many Mountains Moving Presents
Rebecca Foust, Jeffrey Ethan Lee, Frank Sherlock

Rebecca Foust is a native of Pennsylvania and is visiting us tonight from her home in northern California. Her first full-length book, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, won the Many Mountains Moving Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2011 Paterson Prize. God, Seed won the 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award for Poetry and was a Mass Book Award finalist. Foust’s chapbooks, Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe, won the Robert Phillips Poetry Prizes in 2007 and 2008. Her poems are in current issues of The Hudson Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Sewanee Review, Women’s Review of Books and elsewhere.

Jeffrey Ethan Lee’s poetry book, identity papers (Ghost Road Press, 2006) was a 2007 Colorado Book Award finalist. His first full-length poetry book, invisible sister (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2004) was praised in American Book Review, North American Review, Rain Taxi Review etc. Lee won the 2002 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook prize ($1,000) for The Sylf (2003), created identity papers for Drimala Records, published Strangers in a Homeland (chapbook with Ashland Poetry Press, 2001). He also published hundreds of poems, stories and essays in Many Mountains Moving, North American Review, African American Review, American Poetry Review, Xconnect, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Washington Square. He also won the first Tupelo Press award for literary fiction in 2001 for a novel, The Autobiography of Somebody Else.

Frank Sherlock and the Philadelphia Poetry scene are synonymous. His work has been published widely in the small and electronic press. He is the author of Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show, (Night Flag Press), Spring Diet of Flowers at Night, (Mooncalf Press), ISO, (furniture press) and 13, (ixnay press). Past collaborations include work with CAConrad, Jennifer Coleman and sound artist Alex Welsh. Publication of his most recent collaborative poem with Brett Evans, entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual is forthcoming in the near future. Frank has hosted a number of poetry series in the city, the latest The Night Flag Series and is a regular contributor to The Philly Sound Blog. You can visit with Frank at
http://franksherlock.blogspot.com/

Saturday, November 5, 2pm – Poetry
Anne-Adele Wight author of Sidestep Catapult

Anne-Adele Wight lives in Philadelphia, works with the series Poets and
Prophets, and writes as much as she can. She has written two chapbooks and some indefinable constructions. Her new book, Sidestep Catapult, was published recently by BlazeVOX [books].  She is worried about the fate of the biosphere and hopes for a reversal, but doesn’t count on it. Sidestep Catapult is an expression of that concern.

“This book is so good that I keep wanting to write, “Dear Anne-Adele Wight, I love your poems and…” No, that’s not right.  “Dear Anne-Adele Wight, you change me with your poems…”  No, that’s silly.  “Dear poet, look what you have done to me.  Leading me out to the spindly forests of inclination, barely ready for the foreign elements surging from your poetry, your poetry I am surrounded by and in love with, and live in fear of, how, do, you, do, this, to, me?”  With love.” –CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank (Wave Books)

“Sidestep Catapult is a deeply empathetic and superbly special book.
Anne-Adele Wight’s phrasings perform subtle critiques that articulate
exigencies along social curves. Biometric cues pop up. The quotidian is
presented as melting images of muted strangeness in the form of sound
crystals, uremic frost, fault lines, and thyroid necklaces. Wight unravels
the multiplicity of contexts that gives discursive life a present and
presence.” –Brenda Iijima

“Anne-Adele Wight is the Great Mother Earth of poetry in Philadelphia. She loves, provides for, worries about, beautifies, and cries over. Enter
Sidestep Catapult and prepare to be transported, rewarded, and transformed. Urgently, Wight’s poems burn like the wisest of tigers––the tiger of all time––protecting our nights while an “anti-gravity disco ball” hangs overhead. And don’t be surprised if this lush debut leaves you grasping at life with “four thumbs,” for that’s the kind of mysterious, awareness-altering power that Anne-Adele Wight possesses.” —Paul Siegell, author of wild life rifle fire

“In Anne-Adele Wight’s monumental collection, Sidestep Catapult, she
maneuvers time and space to bring us to a new sense of being. With fresh and gorgeous language, she makes a world where letters and colors come together, where “every letter an element/each element its opposite/ each opposite a color/ every color on fire,” where “Birds land on an island to become black flowers,” and where in a “family cave/…hunted animals flank us running in paint.” And she bends our own world into hers so as to show us a truth where “love is grief,” where a sense of longing for a place more beautiful than this world always uncovers the next one.” ––Dorothea Lasky, author of Black Life (Wave Books)