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)

Friday, November 4, 7pm – Poetry
Chronic Chronos Kairos Release Party With
Courtney Bambrick, JenMarie Davis, Nick Gettino, Jacob Russell

Courtney K. Bambrick is the poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Apiary, Certain Circuits, Dirty Napkin, Philadelphia Poets, Mad Poets Review, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. Courtney currently teaches writing and literature at Holy Family University, Philadelphia University, and Gwynedd-Mercy College. She recently coordinated the third annual Children’s Arts Program for kids at Old Academy Players in her neighborhood. She lives with poet Peter Baroth in East Falls.

JenMarie Davis writes and makes books. As half of Fact-Simile Editions, a press that builds books from recycled and reclaimed material, she is concerned with how the phenomenal book manifests: as translation and embodiment. She has fashioned books that have appeared in exhibits such as Handmade/Homemade and her writing has appeared in Glitterpony, Court Green, Little Red Leaves, Interim and Gargoyle. She has a chapbook,  Sometime Soon Ago (Shadow Mountain, 2009).

Nick Gettino is a junior at Swarthmore College. He’s been a first reader for Saturnalia Books’ annual poetry prize and has interned at Tupelo Press. Last April, he was featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s spread of “Philadelphia Poets Under 30.”

Jacob Russell was born in Chicago a long time ago. He arrived in Philly on a Vespa motor scooter in 1964 and never found the exit. He’s been wandering the streets of Philly every since searching for Found Things. Spirit Stick says: “Found Things may be given shelter, but lose all their powers if possessed.” Spirit Stick says: “Found Things can never be lost–were you to discard all Things you claim to own–that they be Found & granted their freedom, we might yet save ourselves from self-destruction.” For links to Jacob’s published writing, check out his blog, Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog.