Poetry Reading

#ArtLitPhx: Poetry Reading: Morgan Parker and Tommy Pico

Superstition Review

#artlitphx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a free event open to the public.
Reserve your spot at tickets.phxart.org

About the poets:

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books, 2015) and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce (Tin House Books, 2017). She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a Pushcart Prize winner. With poet Angel Nafis, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. She lives in Brooklyn. -Poetry Foundation

Tommy Pico is a writer and karaoke enthusiast. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he currently lives in Brooklyn. -Poetry Foundation

Presented with the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University, the Literary and Prologue Society of the Southwest, Superstition Review, and the Angela and Leonard Singer Endowment for Performing Arts.

#ArtLitPhx: District 4 Presents: Jonathan Oak & Poetry Open Mic

Superstition Review

#ArtLitPhxDate: July 19

Time: 7:30pm-9:30pm

Event Description:

Join us for an open mic and our July feature, Jonathan Oak!

Boy golly, it’s hot outside. We know that. You’d think the constant calefaction we experience every day is enough of a reminder. But no. You have to talk about it!

Well, bring your mid-summer fever dreams, your hot-takes, your barely-humid literary spit, your scalding burns, and your thoroughly baked-and-heated-to-an-internal-temperature-of-165-degrees-for-at-least-three-minutes-poetry.

We like cool places. We like cool people, we like to hear new voices. Come join us in July for our Third Thursday poetry reading — open mic! Bring your poetry and spoken word pieces that you’ve been working on to read for a fantastic group of people. We’ll see you there!

#ArtLitPhx: Last Chance Slam

Superstition Review

10 poets in Phoenix will be competing for the Last Chance Slot in the Phoenix Poetry Slam Finals that will be held on June 14! The slam will be hosted by Megaphone PHX (4700 N. Central Ave., Phoenix, Arizona 85012) partnered with Lawn Gnome Publishing, and begins at 8 pm.

The Phoenix Poetry Slam Team Championship will be June 14 at Megaphone PHX!

Tickets are available for purchase here. They also have a poetry slam season pass available if you are interested in attending a number of their events.

#ArtLitPhx: District 4 Presents: Ed Tankersley

Superstition Review

District 4 will be hosting local poet and fiction writer Ed Tankersley at Jarrod’s Coffee, Tea & Gallery (154 W Main St, Mesa, Arizona 85201) where he will be reading new poems.

Ed Tankersley is a  writer from Phoenix, Arizona, his current writing project is The Distance Between Us, a contemporary novel. An excerpt from his novel-in-progress was published in Four Chambers issue 2 in October 2014, and it received a positive notice in The Review Review.

In January 2016, he recorded three of his poems for the Telepoem Booth project, a classic phone booth on which fans can dial up a poem for a listen on a rotary phone.

#ArtLitPhx: District 4 Presents: Melissa Dunmore

Superstition Review

Join District 4 for a beautiful evening with local poet and artist Melissa Dunmore! Melissa Dunmore  is an Afro-Boricua was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and transplanted to Phoenix, Arizona where she studied at Arizona State University. She is a performing artist and producer for Mujeres del Sol , a collective of women and girls in the arts. Dunmore’s bilingual poetry has been published by Mujeres de Maiz, Fem Static, and St. Sucia, as well as in a forthcoming anthology, Song of Yemaya.

Bring your friends, family and co-workers to the sweetest venue- Jarrod’s Coffee, Tea and Gallery. Pop up bookstore by Bonny Books will have hot titles and books by local poets and authors. As always, they will have a limited open mic prior to the feature. Come early to secure your spot on the sign up sheet, a beverage, and seat!

 

#ArtLitPhx: Diana Arterian and Douglas Manuel Poetry Reading

Superstition Review

Poets Diana Arterian and Douglas Manuel, one of our very own Superstition Review contributors, will read from their latest works–Playing Monster :: Seiche and Testify–on Monday, April 30, 2018 at Valley Bar (130 N Central Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85004) at 6:30 pm. Please note this event is 21+.

About the Books:

Playing Monster :: Seiche was the Editrix’s Pick for the 1913 Press Prize for First Books in 2016. This is a book-length poem weaving many threads, but predominantly childhood experiences with an abusive father and, as an adult, increasingly aggressive acts made toward the speaker’s mother by strange men. Playing Monster :: Seiche is a piece of noir poetics. It is memoir. It is documentary.

A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.

About the Authors:

Diana Arterian is the author of Playing Monster :: Seiche (1913 Press, 2017), the chapbooks With Lightness & Darkness and Other Brief Pieces (Essay Press, 2017), Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and co-editor of Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet, 2016). A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, her creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo, and her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in Asymptote, BOMB, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Born and raised in Arizona, she currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a doctoral candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She holds an MFA in poetry from CalArts, where she was a Beutner Fellow.

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He has been the Poetry Editor of Gold Line Press as well as was one of the Managing Editors of Ricochet Editions. His work is featured on Poetry Foundation’s website and has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Los Angeles Review, Superstition Review, Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. His first full length collection of poems, Testify, was released by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2017.

About the Piper Center
Diana and Doug’s reading is presented as part of the Distinguished Visting Writer Series by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, a home for writers, readers, and the literary community, offering talks, readings, classes, workshops, and other literary events and programs

#ArtLitPhx: Poetry Month in the Desert- Readings and Book Signings

Superstition Review

During the month of April, National Poetry Month, Mesa Community College will host, in partnership with Arizona Humanities, two poetry readings in the Elsner Library, Room 300, at Mesa Community College (1833 W Southern Ave, Mesa, AZ 85202). The readings will be Thursdays, April 5 and 19, 2018, at 7:00 pm, followed by a Q&A and book signing. Both events are open to Mesa Community College faculty, staff, and students, and the general public. Refreshments will be provided and books will be available for purchase.

Thursday, April 5, 2018 —  Eloisa Amezcua and Natalie Diaz

Eloisa Amezcua, MacDowell fellow and author of From the Inside Quietly, winner of the inaugural Shelterbelt Poetry Prize.

Natalie Diaz, Lannan Literary Fellow, Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, and author of When My Brother Was an Aztec.

 

Thursday, April 19, 2018 — Bojan Louis and Felicia Zamora

Bojan Louis, Poetry Editor for RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities and author of Currents.

Felicia Zamora, 2017 Poet Laureate for Fort Collins, CO and author of Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

For more information, please contact Josh Rathkamp (480-461-7560) or Ernesto L. Abeytia (602-615-5893).

 

#ArtLitPhx: Fernando Pérez and Bojan Louis Poetry Reading

Superstition Review

Arizona State University alumni Fernando Pérez and Bojan Louis present their poetry collections at 7:00 pm on Friday, March 2, 2018, at Changing Hands bookstore (6428 S McClintock Dr, Tempe, AZ 85283). There will be an open reading from each, with possible signing opportunities. Pérez holds an MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, and is a graduate of ASU’s Creative Writing Program. He currently works as an assistant professor of English at Bellevue College. Louis is also a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State, and is currently the poetry editor at RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, and Humanities, a journal established at the University of Arizona in 1989. As of 2013, the journal is now managed at Arizona State.

Each author’s work has ties to identity, family, and the struggles inherent in each. Pérez, a Chicano poet from Los Angeles, explores how divides of generation and distance affect identity and familial ties in his collection A Song of Dismantling. Louis, an Indigenous American writer, (specifically a member of the Navajo Nation-Naakai Dine’é; Ashiihí; Ta’neezahnii; Bilgáana) has previously written nonfiction work on banned books in “occupied territory” in his chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona, (Guillotine Series, 2012), and further explores topics of diaspora and Native experience poetically in Currents, his collection.

The venue is doubly appropriate for both its location and its mission. Changing Hands is known for its local events, including readings, seminars, Q&A sessions, and book clubs. They host both established and newer authors, and foster an audience for each. The store focuses on building a community of local readers, writers, and lovers of the arts, with a focus on supporting local business, public radio, and schools. They donate to causes that affect the community and remain a fixture of the literary community of Tempe and the surrounding area. As an independent bookstore, they have a commitment to their mission that has stayed true since their establishment in 1974. By showcasing Pérez and Louis, Changing Hands continues the legacy of supporting local authors– specifically, in this case, ones that have attended and graduated from Arizona State.

Though both authors have been featured in literary journals before, this is the first published collection for each. The collections have only been published recently, with A Song of Dismantling released February 15, 2018, and Currents released in November of 2017. Each book is available at Changing Hands both on their website and at their brick-and-mortar location in Tempe. For more information and book ordering, visit Changing Hands’ website or call their Tempe location at 480-730-0205.

 

Contributor Update: Terese Svoboda News

Superstition Review

Terese SvobodaWe are excited to share that Terese Svoboda will be reading some new poetry along with Dennis Nurske at Local 138 on February 10, 2017. Terese has several other upcoming events such as The Lives of Others: Biography as Creative Nonfiction panel at AWP on March 10, 2018, and celebrating the paperback of  Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet at Book Culture with Ajay Chaudhary on March 12, 2018. For more information and events with Terese we recommend visiting her events page at teresesvoboda.com.

Terese’s appearance in Superstition Review begins with an interview in issue 5. She has contributed several guest posts, and has been part of our SR Pod/Vod Series, which can be found here. Madonna in the Terminal, a fiction piece by Terese, can be read in issue 7.

#ArtLitPhx: Cynthia Hogue and Jenny Irish Poetry Reading

Superstition Review

9781597090377Irishc-250x386Cynthia Hogue, ASU’s Marshall Chair in Poetry, and Jenny Irish, Assistant Director of ASU’s Creative Writing Program, give a poetry reading at Changing Hands Bookstore at the Tempe location 6428 S McClintock Dr, Tempe, AZ 85283 on Thursday, February 23rd, 2017 at 7 p.m. Hogue will be reading from her ninth collection, In June the Labyrinth and Irish will be reading from her debut collection, Common Ancestor. For more information on this event, visit the Changing Hands Bookstore’s website. This event is free and open to the public.

Hogue’s In June the Labyrinth the main character of this postmodern fable, travels a trans-historical and trans-geographical terrain, on a quest of sorts, investigating not only the “labyrinth” as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” The story is an earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage.

Hogue has been described in a New York Times micro-review as having a “knack for intensity.” She has published fourteen books, including nine collections of poetry, most recently Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (Red Hen Press, 2017). With Sylvain Gallais, Hogue co-translated Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of poet Virginie Lalucq and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (Omnidawn 2012), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2013. Hogue served as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in the Spring of 2014. She was a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation, and holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.

Irish lives in Tempe, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing and serves as the Assistant Director of the Creative Program at Arizona State University. In addition to her new collection of poetry, Irish’s fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Catapult, Colorado Review, Epoch, and The Georgia Review. Irish’s debut collection of prose poems, Common Ancestor, is an awe-inspiring read. From the confident power of its narratives to the hurricane-force language of its vision, this poetry is riveting. In two dramatic personae series of gorgeous, near-gothic detail, Irish looks at all the havoc humans wreak and does not blink. She scrutinizes violence with rare sang froid, and though never moralizing, leaves us in little doubt of the moral center of her universe: “Metal is not guilty for what it does in man’s hands, absent of soul,” as one poem puts it. In lines laced with brilliant figure and sly internal rhyme, Irish’s poetry is charged by truth’s searing song.