Friday, October 24, 2008

A Special 510 Reading: November 1, 5pm


Put this one on the calendar. It's going to be a great 510 reading: Brian Evenson, A.E. Peterson, Darcelle Bleau. Aaron Cohick of NewLights Press is publishing a handmade book by Brian Evenson, THE DROWNABLE SPECIES. The NewLights Press is an independent publisher of experimental literature and artists books, concentrating primarily on where the two can and do overlap. All NewLights Press books are printed and bound by hand, using techniques ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser printing). The Press was founded in Baltimore in 2000, and currently resides in San Francisco.

Brian Evenson is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Open Curtain (Coffee House), which was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award and was among Time Out New York's top books of 2006. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection) and The Brotherhood of Mutilation. He has translated work by Chrstian Gailly, Jean FrÈmon and Jacques Jouet. He has received an O. Henry Prize as well as an NEA fellowship. A novel, Last Days, and a new collection of stories, Fugue State, are forthcoming in 2009.

A.E. Peterson lives and writes in Baltimore. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Modern Painters, Poets & Writers, Pierogi Press, Brooklyn Review, Center for Digital Storytelling, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Sacatar Foundation, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ucross Foundation, and Julia and David White Artists Colony. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently working on a novel.

Darcelle Bleau graduated from the Johns Hopkins MFA program in 2006. Since then, she has participated in a year-long writing residency at Maryland Art Place and edited the visual literary catalogue, Entangled: Art & Word.

Monday, October 20, 2008

October 18th Reading Highlights

Thanks to everybody who came out Saturday. It was another standing-room only crowd for Charles Rammelkamp, Karen Lillis, and Dan Fesperman. Please remember that we're doubling up in November with readings on November 1st (Brian Evenson, A.E. Peterson, and Darcelle Bleau) and November 15th (Brian Eden, Deborah Radcliffe, and Lia Purpura). Hope to see you then!




Charm City author and poet Charles Rammelkamp, reading from his collection Castleman in the Academy, picks up where last month's Dirty Words reading left off.



Pittsburgh's favorite daughter Karen Lillis joined us to give dynamic, poetic selections from her newest book, The Second Elizabeth.



Baltimore legend Dan Fesperman closes the show with a reading from his novel, The Warlord's Son.

see you in a few weeks!

Monday, October 13, 2008

October 18th Readings: Dan Fesperman, Karen Lillis, and Charles Rammelkamp














Dan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to more than 30 countries and three war zones. He spent most of that time as a correspondent for The Sun, and it wasn't until a trip to Sarajevo in the winter of '94 that he began writing his first novel, at the age of 39. His fifth novel, The Amateur Spy, published this year by Knopf, chronicles the wanderings of a disgraced American aid worker who has been forcefully recruited to spy on an old Palestinian friend, an assignment that carries him across Greece, Jordan, and the West Bank. Dan's books have won two Dagger awards from Britain's Crime Writer's Association, and a Dashiell Hammett award in the US. He lives in Baltimore.















Karen Lillis is the author of the novels, "The Second Elizabeth" (Six Gallery Press, 2009), and "i, scorpion: foul belly-crawler of the desert"; and the serialized novella, "Magenta's Adventures Underground." She has been involved in the small press for a number of years as editor, publisher, and blogger, among other roles. In 2000, she embarked on a cross-country reading tour via Greyhound. Her poems and prose have appeared in such journals as Avatar Review, anderbo.com, Keyhole Magazine, Long Shot, nthposition.com, and Pulse Berlin; her writing is included in "Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of XXperimental Prose from Contemporary Women Writers" (Spuyten Duyvil, June 2008). She has been a photographer in Virginia, a bookseller in New York City, an art critic in Texas, a writer-in-residence in Paris, and is currently a library science student in Pittsburgh. You can find her on myspace at: http://www.myspace.com/eyescorpion.

Charles Rammelkamp has lived in Baltimore for the past twenty-five years. He's been involved with a variety of publications, including being on the editorial board of THE TEACHER'S VOICE, and he edited a collection of essays entitled FAKE-CITY SYNDROME for Red Hen Press on American cultural issues to be used in college composition and rhetoric classes. He currently edits an online "journal of politics and poetry" called THE POTOMAC. He has published a number of works, including a novel, THE SECRETKEEPERS (Red Hen Press), and a collection of poems, THE BOOK OF LIFE (March Street Press), and several chapbooks, including GO TO HELL, a sequence that deals with a semester in the life of an adjunct English instructor. CASTLEMAN IN THE ACADEMY is a collection of eleven interrelated stories, recently published by March Street Press, about Roger Castleman, a writing teacher at a community college in Baltimore.