Arizona State University Downtown Student Showcase features poets, fiction writers, spoken word artists, and filmmakers. This bi-annual event takes place on Thursday, November 17 at The Grand Central Coffee Company (718 N Central Ave, Phoenix 85004) at 7 p.m. The performers include Megan Condeno Atencia, Sawyer Elms, Daniela Diaz, Anna Flores, Nick Pesch, Amanda Astrid Peterson, Richard Sais, Tonissa Saul, Mathias Session, and Kellen Shover. The free event is hosted by Rosemarie Dombrowski. For more information please visit the Facebook event.
Poetry Reading
#ArtLitPhx: Four Chambers Presents Jeredith Merrin
Four Chambers Press presents poet Jeredith Merrin and her latest chapbook, Owling. Merrin will be reading at The Coronado on Thursday, November 17 at 7 p.m. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.
Jeredith Merrin, brought up in the Pacific Northwest, took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She’s authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), Merrin lives near Phoenix.
Contributor Update, Catherine Pierce: AWP Reading
If you’re going to be in Washington, D.C. for AWP 2017, here’s something to keep in mind: Catherine Pierce, winner of the Saturnalia Books of Poetry Prize, will be participating in an offsite reading along with several other authors published by Saturnalia Books. This will take place on the 9th of February 2017.
To read her poem that was published in Issue 8 of our magazine, click here.
You can also check out some of her other poems on her website.
#ArtLitPhx: A Poetry Reading by Rigoberto González
Award-winning poet Rigoberto González will be reading on Monday, November 7 at 7 p.m. at Arizona State University, Tempe Campus. This event is free and open to the public. Memorial Union’s Pima Auditorium will open its doors at 6:30 p.m.
Rigoberto González is the author four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His ten books of prose include two bilingual children’s books, the three young adult novels in the Mariposa Club series, the novel Crossing Vines, the story collection Men Without Bliss, and three books of nonfiction, including Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He also edited Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and Alurista’s new and selected volume Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology. The recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships, a NYFA grant in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Center Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award, he is contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. In 2015, he received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. As of 2016, he serves as critic-at-large with the Los Angeles Times and sits on the Board of Trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). He earned graduate degrees from the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State University in Tempe.
This event is hosted by the ASU Department of English and its Creative Writing Program, along with the Humanities Division of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information, please visit the event page and/or the Facebook event.
#ArtLitPhx: Launch of the ASU DPC/Lawn Gnome Poetry + Public Art Project
Join ASU students and local visual artists on Friday, November 4 at 7 p.m. for the Launch of the ASU DPC/Lawn Gnome Poetry + Public Art Project event. The event takes place at Lawn Gnome Books (905 N 5th St, Phoenix, AZ).
Eight undergraduate poets on the DPC (under the direction of Rosemarie Dombrowski) produced poems under 25 words inspired by the city, its the desert ecology, and the people who inhabit it. The students will read for ten minutes of any literary work of their choice. Local artists then came together (under the organization of Aaron Johnson) to produce corresponding artwork. Both the poems and the artwork will be painted onto eight 8’x4’ boards that will be installed at Lawn Gnome Books and unveiled on the First Friday.
The eight ASU Downtown campus poets are Megan Atencia, Sawyer Elms, Daniela Diaz, Anna Florez, Mandy Peterson, Richard Sais, Matthew Session, and Kellen Shover.
The reading will be followed by a Q & A with the poets and artists. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.
#ArtLitPhx: Phoenix Poetry Series. Jia Oak Baker & Lois Roma-Deeley
The Phoenix Poetry Series showcases some of the best poets in our community. This month, Jia Oak Baker and Lois Roma-Deeley will be reading their work at The Coronado. The event takes place on Friday, October 28 at 7 p.m. 2201 N 7th St, Phoenix, Arizona 85006. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.
Jia Oak Baker is the author of two chapbooks, Well Enough to Travel (Five Oaks Press) and Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City (Dancing Girl Press). She is the recipient of a 2015 grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and is a literary teaching artist for the City of Phoenix. She has been awarded residencies from the Wurlitzer Foundation and from Hedgebrook. Jia earned a MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Paradise Valley Community College.
Lois Roma-Deeley is the author of four collections of poetry, the latest being The Short List of Certainties (Franciscan University Press, 2017), which won the Jacopone da Todi Poetry Book Series Award. High Notes, her third collection was a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist forms the basis of a music drama for which she wrote the book and lyrics. Her first and second collections are Rules of Hunger and North Sight. She was named 2012-2013 U.S Professor of the Year-Community College by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE. She’s published in twelve national anthologies including Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets Series). Roma-Deeley has won numerous awards and honors for her poetry, and her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the U.S. and Canada. She’s taught creative writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels and served as poetry co-editor for PKP Forum for ten years.
#ArtLitPhx: Kristin Berger & Scot Siegel Reading Hosted by Four Chambers Press
Four Chambers Press presents poets Kristin Berger and Scot Siegel at The Coronado. The event takes place on Thursday, October 27 at 7 pm. Both poets will be reading from their latest poetry collections. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.
Kristin Berger is the author of the poetry collection How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a poetry chapbook, For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and was co-editor of VoiceCatcher 6: Portland/Vancouver Area Women Writers and Artists (2011). Her long prose-poem, Changing Woman & Changing Man: A High Desert Myth, was a finalist for the 2016 Newfound Prose Prize. Kristin is the recipient of writer residencies from Playa and OSU’s Spring Creek Project, and her poetry and essays have appeared in Cirque, Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming, Terrain.org, You Are Here, and in the forthcoming anthology, Drought, from Tiger’s Eye Press. A Detroit-native, Kristin has lived in Portland for 22 years, and is co-host of a poetry series at the Lents International Farmer’s Market. For more information visit the website.
Scot Siegel was born in Oakland, California, and grew up near Lake Tahoe where he was a nationally ranked junior ski racer. He has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1987 and resides in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Siegel is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2016) and Thousands Flee California Wildflowers (Salmon Poetry, 2012). He has received awards and commendations from the Oregon Poetry Association, Nimrod International, Aesthetica (UK), Poetry Northwest, and the Oregon State Library. Siegel is the recipient of writer residencies with Playa at Summer Lake and Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project. His poetry is part of the permanent art installation along the Portland-to-Milwaukie Light Rail ‘Orange Line’. For more information, visit Siegel’s website.
#ArtLitPhx: Marsha de la O: Antidote for Night. Sally Ball: Wreck Me
Poets Marsha de la O and ASU associate professor Sally Ball will be reading from their latest poem collections at Changing Hands Phoenix. De la O presents her Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection Antidote for Night. Sally Ball presents her latest collection, Wreck Me. The event takes place on Saturday, October 15 at 7 p.m. For more information, please visit the Changing Hands website or the Facebook event.
MARSHA DE LA O holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Vermont College. Her latest book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and an Editor’s Choice Small Press Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Apercus Quarterly, Bosque, and the New Yorker. She lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poet and editor Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and are also the editors and publishers of the literary journal Askew.
SALLY BALL is the author of Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in NOR, Pleiades, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Harvard Review, and other magazines, as well as online at Narrative and Slate, and in The Best American Poetry. An associate professor of English at Arizona State University, Ball is also an associate director of Four Way Books. She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CAMAC Centre d’Art, the James Merrill House, and the Ucross Foundation.
#ArtLitPhx: Brenda Hillman & Robert Hass at the Phoenix Art Museum
The University of Arizona Poetry Center presents distinguished poets Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass at the Phoenix Art Museum. The event takes place on Friday, October 7th at 7:00 p.m. After the reading, there will be a short Q&A and a book signing. The Poetry Center is proud to partner with the Phoenix Art Museum with additional support from ASU’s Creative Writing Program, Superstition Review, Four Chambers Press, and the Literary & Prologue Society of the Southwest.
Brenda Hillman is the author of nine collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor.
Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Transtromer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp). He was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry. His essay collection Now & Then, which includes his Washington Post articles, was published in April 2007. As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW), an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book.
Leah Marché will be opening the reading. Leah Marché is an arts entrepreneur, performance poet and journalist/writer. In 2005, she co-founded BlackPoet Ventures, a Valley-based performance arts company that produces spoken word theatrical performances.
For more information and updates, please visit the Facebook event.
#ArtLitPhx: Phoenix Poetry Series. Venita Blackburn and Virginia Chase Sutton
The Phoenix Poetry Series showcases some of the best poets in our community. Venita Blackburn and Virginia Chase Sutton, two award-winning writers, will be reading their work at The Coronado. The event takes place on Friday, September 23rd at 7 p.m. 2201 N 7th St, Phoenix, Arizona 85006. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Georgia Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Smoke Long Quarterly, Café Irreal, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, Devil’s Lake Review, Nat.Brut., Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and a Pushcart prize nomination the same year among other accolades. In 2016 she received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction, which will result in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. Her home town is Compton, California, but she now lives and teaches in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her MFA from Arizona State University in 2008, and is finishing a new novel, Guts.
Virginia Chase Sutton’s work has appeared Paris Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Boulevard, Quarterly West, and many other journals and anthologies. She’s been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, Levis Poetry Prize, Brittingham Prize and others. Five times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she has been the Louis Untermeyer Scholar at Bread Loaf and has won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Her prize winning collection, What Brings You To Del Amo, was published in 2007 by University Press of New England. Her new book, Of a Transient Nature, was published this spring by Knut House Press.