Thursday, September 30, 5:30pm – Poetry

Sandy Tseng & Alicia Ostriker

Sandy Tseng author of Sediment ($15.95 Four Way Books)
In Sandy Tseng’s first collection, leaving is both what remains and the act of going to another place, a different lifestyle, an unknown afterlife. This book recounts the pleasures and terrors of transition, of being “in between languages.” We travel with Tseng, learning that the sediment of our lives–received traditions, half-recalled memories, accrued possessions–might also be fragments by which we recognize a future life, here or elsewhere. Among SANDY TSENG’S awards are the 2006 Discovery / The Nation Award, Crab Orchard Review’s 2005 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and scholarships from the Vira I. Heinz Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker author of The Book of Seventy ($14.95 University of Pittsburgh Press)
Alicia Ostriker seizes the opportunity to take us where too few poets have been able to take us: into a domain of what our fabulists like to call the “golden years.” as we live longer, we become inevitably curious about the actual texture of these late years, curious about what happens in the soul. Out of that curiosity is a new kind of poetry born, an elderstile that has passion and irony, wisdom, folly, clarity and tenderness. In her keen engagement with the self and the world, Ostriker offers us a voice and a perspective that explore the territory of seventy and beyond. Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of eleven previous poetry collections, including: The Mother/Child Papers; No Heaven; the volcano sequence; and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Ostirker is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of Drew University.

Tuesday, September 28, 7pm – Poetry

The Moonstone Poetry Series

Eleanor Wilner & Mary Lynn Ellis

Eleanor Wilner author of Visitor in Hell ($18.00 University of Chicago Press)

Eleanor Wilner has published six collections of poems, most recently The Girl with Bees in Her Hair; Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems; and Otherwise. Her work has appeared in over thirty anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1990 and The Norton Anthology of Poetry. About Wilner’s work, the poet Wilner has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Juniper Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes.

Former editor of The American Poetry Review, she is currently an Advisory Editor of Calyx. She has taught, most recently, at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and Smith College. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in Philadelphia.

“Wilner . . . has a deep and heroic belief in the transformative power of language and myth. She paddles her surfboard outside the reef where most poets stop; she rides the big waves.” – Tony Hoagland

Mary Lynn Ellis co-author of  With a Poet’s Eye: Children Translate the World ($36.25 Heinemann)

In this book the authors show how young children come to love playing with language as they create poems and how poetry is part of the entire curriculum. “Through in-depth dialogue, this gifted duo exposes their classes to poetry through music, art, dreams, letters, and the natural world. They capture the essence of what poetry is, its power to transform through metaphor, and the joy of seeing anew through one’s own “Poet’s Eye”.”–Voices from the Middle. Mary Lynne Ellis has taught at Villanova University and Abington Friends School. A veteran elementary school teacher, Jane McVeigh-Shultz currently teaches at Abington Friends School in Pennsylvania

Sunday, September 26, 3pm – $3 Cover & Pot Luck – Swap Meet

VolkLibre!/Handmade Philly Swap Meet

The beginning of a new era; exchange leads to real change.

Sunday, September 26, 11am – Discussion

The Nation Magazine Discussion Group

Friday, September 24, 7:30pm – Science Fiction

Philadelphia Fantastic Presents

L.A. Banks author of the Crimson Moon Series

L.A. Banks’ bestselling Crimson Moon series continues, and this time the otherworldly threat is dangerously personal… Secret government operative Sasha Trudeau earned a long vacation with her lover and fellow Shadow Wolf, Hunter, after the brutal wolf-like attacks that left New Orleans in an uproar. But when her team calls with news of vampire slayings, Sasha knows it’s only a matter of time before another war breaks out among the supernatural denizens of the world …

LEFT FOR UNDEAD – The vampires are nobody’s ally, but the cold-hearted deaths of their own kind make them even more bloodthirsty than usual. But who is the culprit? With the Seelie and Unseelie courts claiming innocence and aligning together, Sasha’s team is at a loss. Until they discover that they’re facing ancient creatures from the depths of hell itself, bent on unleashing pure fury …

“The darkly thrilling Crimson Moon series…bursts with treachery and supernatural chills.” —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“An action-packed thrill ride!” —Sherrilyn Kenyon

L. A. BANKS is the author of the Vampire Huntress LegendTM series. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and a master’s in fine arts from Temple University. Banks considers herself a shape-shifter. She has written romance, women’s fiction, crime and suspense, and of course, dark vampire huntress lore. She lives with her daughter in an undisclosed lair somewhere in Philadelphia. You can visit her at www.vampire-huntress.com or crimsonmoonnovels.com

Wednesday, September 22, 7pm – Poetry

Many Mountains Moving Magazine Reading

Jeffrey Lee, senior poetry editor

Tuesday, September 21, 7pm – Poetry

Poets & Prophets Presents

Bob Small

Wednesday, September 15, 7pm – Crime Fiction

Duane Swierczynski & Dennis Tafoya

Duane Swierczynski author of Expiration Date ($13.99 Minotaur Books) In this neighborhood, make a wrong turn… and you’re history.

Dennis Tafoya author of The Wolves of Fairmount Park ($25.99 Minotaur Books) The Wolves of Fairmount is Dennis Tafoya’s lyrical, intense, sometimes tragic and sometimes hopeful second novel.

Tuesday, September 14, 7pm – Poetry

Moonstone Poetry Series Presents

Daniel Donaghy & Connie Garcia-Barrio

In his second collection of poems, Daniel Donaghy uses the power of poetry to connect the Kensington section of Philadelphia he knew as a boy––a place replete with crime, poverty, fractured families, and various other kinds of darkness––to upstate New York’s woods, rural Connecticut’s town greens and small churches, Vancouver’s back alleys, the killing ground of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa County, Colorado, and the shores of ancient Greece. In doing so, he examines the relationship between memory and identity and strives to give voice to those who might otherwise be forgotten by history. Start with the Trouble is the place of fist fights and first kisses, where we sit beside the dying and where we sing to those not yet born. It is where Michelangelo’s Pieta recreates itself on a Kensington sidewalk, where a mother watches helplessly as two older boys dangle her son from the roof of a building, where a prostitute writes poems between tricks before she disappears without a trace. It is where Bruce Springsteen goes back in time to woo Circe and the Sirens, where a father returns from the dead in the voice of Babe Ruth, where a mother’s spirit rises from the shadows of spruce trees, where Santa forsakes his reindeer and slides into town behind sled dogs. It is where simple gestures such as opening a car trunk or loading a wheelbarrow become portals into faraway, nightmarish worlds in which the young are forced to bear too much witness to the world. Start with the Trouble is a place where beauty exists amidst every kind of ugliness, and where that beauty is made even more precious because of the depths from which it rises.

“Start with the Trouble is a memory-haunted book. Returning to the mean streets of Philadelphia, to an ‘El-darkened neighborhood,’ Donaghy tells stories of fathers home from aching labor, of kids who quit school, get in fights or accidents, drift off, or disappear. In the end, this is a hymn to lives that don’t flower, shot through with loss and, finally, redemption.” Kim Addonizio, author of Ordinary Genius

“Donaghy takes us to a corner of the City of Hope where hope ‘such a simple word’ exists as a complex illusion amidst the city’s everyday cruelties. You won’t find this corner on any tourist map. Here, survival is the only monument. While many of these poems look back, it is not with nostalgia but with desperation to preserve those who have been lost. These poems exist because they have no choice. . . . Donaghy is the real deal. He’s not striking any poses or doing any fancy dances. These poems grab you by the collar and compel you to listen.” Jim Daniels, author of Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies

“Dan Donaghy could have been a stonecutter, but he chose to work something harder. Amazing, in these finely sculpted poems, how beautiful trouble and loss and pain can be, how excruciatingly pleasureable. We begin, and so often end, in trouble, a fact these poems do not deny. But, still, Donaghy tells us, trouble is not all we have.” Jake Adam York, author of A Murmuration of Starlings

“Poem after poem offers the consolation of a thoughtful human spirit who struggles with the blackness and is not broken. Never peripheral to human experience, Donaghy’s poems, centered in the heart, teach us to preserve.” Vivian Shipley, author of Hardboot: New and Old Poems

Connie Garcia-Barrio, a hometown girl, teaches at Community College of Philadelphia.  Her credits include the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Christian Science Monitor and Wild River Review,  Interact Theatre chose her short story, “The Sitting Tree,” for a reading by a professional actress.  She has just finished a novel based on Philadelphia’s black history.

Monday, September 13, 6:30pm – Fiction Workshop

Monday, September 20, 6:30pm – Fiction Workshop

Monday, September 27, 6:30pm – Fiction Workshop

Philadelphia Stories Fiction Workshop

For more information please email: christine@philadelphiastories.org