 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Dave Kress and Neno Perrotta, January 7
Dave Kress lives and writes in Warren, Rhode Island; two of his books have been published by Mammoth press, a novel called Counting Zero and a “creature” called Martians. Currently, he’s working on a new novel called Glorified—or—Thermometers of God and on a book of “proems” called The Golden Book of Science.
Neno Perrotta was born in Evansville, Indiana, and grew up in Brookfield, Ohio. He received a B.A. In English from Youngstown State University in 1985. Neno was also a founding member of the alternative band Ed’s Redeeming Qualities. He currently lives in Brookfield, Ohio. Not One Thing About Science is his first collection.
John Repp and Jennifer Bannan, February 4
|
|
Jennifer Bannan’s short story collection, Inventing Victor, was published October 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and received rave reviews from the Kirkus Reviews, Atlanta’s Creative Loafing and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Her stories have also appeared in ACM, Passages North, Café Eighties, The Allegheny Review, WomenWriters.net and Radio Transcript Newspaper. She works as a marketing consultant for Zer0 to 5ive, a technology marketing firm. Jennifer is a 1991 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s creative writing program. She has a daughter and son, Tova Rae and Desmond Moses.
Nancy Reisman / Thomas Sayers Ellis / Rick Hilles, March 4
Nancy Reisman is the author of the novel The First Desire (Pantheon, 2004) and the story collection House Fires, which won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work is forthcoming in The O.Henry Award Stories 2005, and other stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories 2001, Tin House, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals and anthologies. She’s received fellowships from the NEA, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She grew up in Western New York, and is currently teaching at the University of Michigan.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room: Poems, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call and response becomes Steinian echo becomes hip-hop becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out a DC go-go club. Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and in Take Three: 1. He currently teaches at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Rick Hilles’ work has appeared in Harper’s, Poetry, The Nation and The New Republic. He was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poet for 2002-03 and has a collection of translations of Wislawa Szymborska forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd (December, 2005) and a chapbook of poetry, Preparing for Flight, forthcoming with Pudding House. He currently teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman, April 8
Matthew Zapruder is the author of American Linden, winner of the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including The Boston Review, Fence, Bomb, McSweeney’s, Jubilat, Conduit, Harvard Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is the co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu. He is the Editor of Verse Press, the co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series, and an instructor of Creative Writing at the New School in New York City. In the spring of 2005 he will be visiting professor of Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
Joshua Beckman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Your Time Has Come (Verse Press, 2004), He lives in Staten Island, New York.
Tom House / Randy Mann, May 6
Tom House’s fiction has appeared in over two dozen publications, including Harper’s, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, The North American Review, Genre, and Best American Gay Fiction. His award-winning first novel, The Beginning of Calamities, is a dark comedy about an 11-year-old and his band of outcasts who stage a disastrous production of a Passion play at a Long Island Catholic elementary school in 1973. Now a Hamptons resident, Tom holds an MA in creative writing from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. To contact the author or to read from his published work, please visit www.HouseStories.net.
Randall Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (Zoo Press, 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Salamagundi. He lives in San Francisco.
Lori Jakiela and John Dalton, June 3
Lori Jakiela's first full-length book, Miss New York Has Everything, a memoir, is forthcoming from Warner Books (January 2006). The first chapter of her book, "I Am Not A Zombie, But I Played One on TV," was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize. Her essays and poems have appeared in DoubleTake, River Styx, The Chicago Review, Slipstream, Brevity, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Regulars (Liquid Paper Press) was awarded first prize in Nerve Cowboy's 2001 chapbook contest.
Jennifer L. Knox / Daniel Nester / Shanna Compton, July 16,
Soft Skull Press, Cookout Extravaganza
Soft Skull Press... “...takes pride in putting out books other publishers avoid like ricin” (Wall Street Journal) ... “thinking globally and publishing quirkily” (Flavorpill LA)… “[is] like Grove Press in the 1950’s and 1960’s” (Quill & Quire)… “Visionary”(Publishers Weekly)
Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California. She attended the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate, and received her MFA in poetry at New York University. She is co-curator of the Pete's Big Salmon poetry reading series and lives in Brooklyn with a husband, writer Sean McNally, and a cat, Tokyo Roy. Her poetry has also appeared in the anthologies The Best American Poetry (2003 and 1997), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present, and Free Radicals: American Poets before Their First Books. A GRINGO LIKE ME is her first book.
Shafer Hall's poems and collaborations have appeared in LIT, Lungfull!, Puppyflowers, 32 Poems, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Shampoo, and many other journals. He is the coauthor, with Shanna Compton, of the chapbook Big Confetti, and has also been featured on the Poetic Brooklyn radio show. He is the curator of the Frequency Series at the Four-Faced Liar in Greenwich Village, and has been called “probably the worst bartender in New York City,” an honorific of which he is unusually proud.
Shanna Compton's book DOWN SPOOKY won the 2004 Winnow Press Open Poetry Award and will be published in September 2005. Her poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2005, Verse, McSweeney's, MiPoesisas, No Tell Motel, and elsewhere. She is an editor-at-large for LIT at New School University and the Associate Publisher of Soft Skull Press. In 2004 she edited an anthology of essays on the subject of video games called GAMERS: WRITERS, ARTISTS & PROGRAMMERS ON THE PLEASURES OF PIXELS. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Visit her online at www.shannacompton.com.
Sean Thomas Dougherty / Steve Sherrill, August 5
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of seven full-length books including the forthcoming Your Voice After Desnos (Boa Editions), Nightshift, Belonging to Lorca (2004 Mammoth Books), and the book of experimental prose The Biography of Broken Things (2003 Mitki/Mitki Press). His awards include a 2004 PA Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2003 Penn State Junior Faculty Research Award for Non-Fiction. He teaches all three genres in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at Penn State Erie.
Steven Sherrill, Assistant Professor of English, teaches Creative Writing and Integrative Arts courses at Penn State Altoona. After receiving a Welding Diploma from Mitchell Community College (and the passing of a considerable amount of time) he went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction in 2002. His first novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, is being published in nine languages. His second novel, Visits From the Drowned Girl, published by Random House, US and Canongate, UK was released in June of this year.
Lynn Emanuel and Jean Valentine, September 2
Lynn Emanuel is the author of three books of poetry, Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, and Then, Suddenly, which received the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and in Best American Poetry. She has been a poetry editor for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, a member of the Literature Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, a judge for the James Laughlin Award sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, and a judge for the 2003-04 National Book Award in poetry. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Bennington Writers’ Conference, The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Vermont College Creative Writing Program. She was the Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh for the past five years.
Jean Valentine is the author of eight books of poetry. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. Her newest book, Door in the Mountain: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2003 has been chosen as a National Book Award Finalist. Jean teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y.
Ross Gay and Nancy McCabe, October 7
Ross Gay’s manuscript, Phantom Limb, is forthcoming in Fall of 2006 from CavanKerry Press. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, North American Review, Sulfur and Margie, among several others. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a Breadloaf Tuition Scholar, a basketball coach, and an occasional demolition man.
Nancy McCabe’s creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Fourth Genre, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, and Writer’s Digest, among others. Her work has received a Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award and several Pushcart nominations as well as a Pushcart Prize for memoir. Two of her essays have been listed in Best American Essays. Her books are After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening (Purdue 2003) and Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption (Missouri 2003).
Stacey Waite and David Groff, November 4
David Groff is a poet, writer, and book editor living in New York City. His book Theory of Devolution was selected by poet Mark Doty for the 2001 National Poetry Series open competition and was published in 2002 by the University of Illinois Press. It was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle Award. He is the co-author with the late Robin Hardy of The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood, (Houghton Mifflin/University of Minnesota Press) and co-editor of Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemproary Photographers (Universe/Rizzoli). His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Chicago Review, Christopher Street, Confrontation, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, and other magazines. He has taught at The University of Iowa, where he received his MFA and MA degrees, Rutgers and New York Universities, William Paterson University, and with the National Association for Advancement in the Arts.
Stacey Waite was the recipient of the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize in Poetry for her chapbook, “Choke.” Her poems have appeared most recently in Bloom, The Marlboro Review, Nimrod and West Branch. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh.
Alessandra Lynch and Rebecca Skloot, December 2
Alessandra Lynch was raised with Russian Wolfhounds North of NYC. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarterly West, and others. Her first book of poetry, Sails the Wind Left Behind, was published by Alice James Books in 2002. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Composition and Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown and is working steadily on her second book of poetry.
Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning freelance writer, a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, and a television correspondent for PBS's Nova ScienceNOW series. She writes feature stories, essays, and reviews for The New York Times Magazine, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, New York Magazine, and others. Skloot specializes in writing about science and medicine, but is known to cover a wide range of topics, from food politics and goldfish surgery to packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. Her work has been anthologized in several collections, including The Best Food Writing 2005. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is forthcoming from Crown, a division of Random House. For more information: www.rebeccaskloot.com
Gist Street Reading Series
Copyright © 2002-2007 Gist Street Readings. All rights reserved.