A special series of ticketed interviews and readings – single program ticket: $15.00 ; Series Subscription (Three Programs): $35.00
Books will be available for purchase and to be autographed.
Tuesday December 13, 2015 – 6:30pm
Samuel R. Delany
Interview & Reading
Moonstone @ Moonstone Preschool
750 South 13th Street
Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., Chip Delany to his friends, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), Nova, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. From January 2001 until his retirement in May 2015, he was a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2010 he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR libraries. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th SFWA Grand Master in 2013.
In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany, Volume1, 1957-1969 ($40.00 Wesleyan, Dec 6, 2016) – For fifty years Samuel Delany has cultivated a special relationship with language in works of fiction, criticism, and memoir that have garnered critical praise and legions of fans. The present volume – the first in a series – reveals a new dimension of his genius. In Search of Silence presents over a decade’s worth of Delany’s private journals, commencing in 1957 when he was still a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and ending in 1969 when he was living in San Francisco and on the verge of reconceiving the novel that would become Dhalgren.
Interviewed by Don Riggs – “I am currently writing a series of entries for an Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters; my entries are on Tolkien’s Monsters, Fauns and Satyrs, the Sphinx, and Gargantua and Pantagruel. I have recently written an entry on Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Richard Linklater’s film version of that novel by the same title. Much of my scholarly work deals with the Fantastic in the arts, both science fiction and fantasy, in literature and in film. I have recently published poems online in Orizon Literar (Bucharest) and write a regular column on poetry for the online journal Press 1.”
Sunday November 8, 2015 – 3pm
Gregory Pardlo
Welcome Gregory Pardlo back to Philadelphia for an interview and reading from his new poetry collection Digest ($15.95 Four Way Books). Gregory Pardlo is author of Digest, which won the Pulitzer prize for Poetry in 2015. His first book, Totem, received the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Best American Poetry 2010, as well as several anthologies, including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lotos Club Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The New York Times. He is an associate editor of Callaloo, and his second collection, Digest, was published by Four Way Books in 2014. In 2015, he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Digest.
Gregory will be interviewed by Leonard Gontarek, who will also read with him.
Sunday September 13, 2015 – 3pm
Major Jackson
Welcome Major Jackson back to Philadelphia for an interview and reading from his new poetry collection Roll Deep: Poems ($26.95 Norton). Major Jackson is author of a new book of poems, Roll Deep: Poems $26.95 Norton), as well as Holding Company and Hoops, both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. In 2006-07, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Major will be interviewed by Warren Longmire.
Roll Deep will be available for purchase at the event. You can also pre-order an autographed copy for $25.00 to be picked up at the event or $30.00 to be shipped to you. To pre-order, please click here:
On Roll Deep:
“Major Jackson’s fourth collection of poetry, Roll Deep, juxtaposes the physical and the metaphysical, the external and the internal where the landscape and the mind of the poet converge until time bends. The imagery travels through a timely multiplicity, always surefooted and attuned, but never outdistancing the natural truth in this cosmopolitan voice. The poet writes the world he encounters, and imagines, with playfully deep interplay. The music in the language of Roll Deep is seductively straightforward, and each body-brain poem here puts genius squarely on the line.” — Yusef Komunyakaa
Sunday October 11, 2015 – 3pm
Keith Gilyard
Welcome Keith Gilyard back to Philadelphia for an interview and reading from his new poetry collection Wing of Memory ($7.95 Whirlwind Press). Raymond Keith Gilyard is author of Wing of Memory ($7.95 Whirlwind Press) and three other books of poetry as well as five scholarly books including True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy and numerous text and articles. He is a professor of English at Penn State University who teaches and researches in the fields of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and African American literature. His primary interest lies in identifying intersections of African American English and composition practices. Advocating African American English as a legitimate discourse, Gilyard is a prominent voice in the movement to recognize ethnic and cultural discourses other than Standard English as valid. As a literary scholar, his interests have been in the interplay between African American literature and rhetorical criticism and in bio-critical work.
Keith will be interviewed by Lamont Steptoe
Lamont B. Steptoe is a poet / photographer / publisher born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and/or editor of fifteen poetry collections, the latest of which is Meditations in Congo Square. He is the winner of an American Book Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Steptoe is a father, Vietnam veteran, and founder of Whirlwind Press.