Between Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens there are readings happening every night. Each Sunday, Coldfront will feature five upcoming readings.

Poetry Project Finale

Monday, May 21st 8pm

Uyen Hua is the author of a/s/l (Ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni). Her work has appeared in Shampoo Poetry, West Wind Review, Abraham Lincoln, and Tacocat. She currently lives in the Bay Area.

Lauren Levin is from New Orleans and lives in Oakland. She is the author of Song (The Physiocrats), Keenan (Lame House Press) and Not Time (Boxwood Editions). Recent work appeared or is forthcoming in Little Red Leaves, With+Stand, Peaches and Bats, and Big Bell, and an essay on the vital demystified art of Anne Boyer and Stephanie Young just ran in Lana Turner. She spends her time being part of the Poetic Labor Project, Mrs. Maybe, and Debt: A Play.

Cathy Park Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. It was followed by Dance Dance Revolution, chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and published in 2007 by WW Norton. This May, Norton will publish her newest collection, Engine Empire. Hong is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and other journals, and she has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, and Salon. She serves as a poetry editor for jubilat magazine. She is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and is regular faculty at the Queens MFA program in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church
131 E. 10th Street
New York, NY

HOT TEXTS

Tuesday, May 22 7pm

Curated by local poet-activists Krystal Languell, Rachel Levitsky and Emily Skillings, HOT TEXTS is a Brooklyn reading series that celebrates innovative writing rooted in desire, sexual politics, the erotic sphere, and the body. HOT TEXTS is an extension of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist, avant-garde event series, collective, and publishing venture.

Kate Schapira is the author of TOWN (Factory School, Heretical Texts), The Bounty: Four Addresses (Noemi Press), How We Saved the City (Stockport Flats) and The Soft Place (forthcoming from Horse Less Press), as well as six chapbooks. She lives in Providence, RI, where she co-runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series and teaches writing to college students and fourth graders.

Sina Queyras is most recently the author of Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House 2011). Her collection Expressway (Coach House 2009) was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Lemon Hound (Coach House 2006) won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction has appeared in journals internationally including The London Review, Poetry, Fence, Geist and Siecle 21. In 2005 she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets for Persea Books. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford, and Concordia University in Montreal, where she currently resides.

Melissa Broder is the author of two collections of poems, Meat Heart and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother. Recent poems have appeared in Guernica, Redivider, The Missouri Review, and Court Green. She edits La Petite Zine and, by day, is a publicity manager at Penguin.

H.R. Hegnauer is the author of Sir (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). She is a freelance book and website designer who works with both independent publishers and individual artists and writers. She maintains a portfolio of her work at hrhegnauer.com. H.R. is a member of Belladonna* and the poets’ theater group GASP: Girls Assembling Something Perpetual.

The first fifteen people to arrive will receive a free, signed book from one of the readers.

The Way Station
683 Washington Ave, Brooklyn, NY

The Inspired Word

Wednesday, May 23rd 7pm-10pm

Hala A. is a doctoral student, a psychologist-in-training, and a poet. She writes relentlessly and has been featured at various venues throughout the New York City poetry scene, including the Nightingale Lounge, Cornelia Cafe’s Son of Pony and the Bowery Poetry Club. She is currently working on her first full-length manuscript, due to come out in the following year by Three Rooms Press. As an Arab-American, Hala has lived all over the world, spanning from Oklahoma to Beirut. Her poetry is deeply influenced by these distinct geographic spaces, as well as the intimacy of imagination. Mythical figures, literary characters, and inanimate objects alike are reworked and transformed in her work.

“Britta B.” Badour, 23, is a rising star in Toronto’s spoken word poetry community. In addition to performing at the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe, opening for HBO Def Poetry star Carlos Andrés Gómez, she spent the summer in 2010 leading a group of high school students on a trip to Kenya, Africa. She won her first public speaking contest at the age of 8 and has since traveled across Canada and parts of the United States as a keynote motivational speaker, inspiring thousands about the power of using one’s voice to change the world.

A. Lyric is a multifaceted artist – a poet, actor, singer, and songwriter. She published her first poetry chapbook last year and has performed poetry throughout New York City. She has acted in Off Broadway production of both Pippin and The Wiz, in plays I Lost my Heart in Haiti (about the tragic earthquake), A Season in The Congo, The Blues According to Langston Hughes, Barn Razing, and in Hunter College’s Vagina Monologues. She has also sung an ecclectic array of Jazz, Blues, R&B and Funk songs in several Big Apple venues, including Sugar Bar, Shrine and Uncle Charlie’s Lounge.

Open mic to follow.

116
116 MacDougal, New York, NY

Contra Mundum Press Presents: A Soiree in Honor of Romanian Surrealist Ghérasim Lucand the First English Tr. of His Verse

Friday, May 25 5pm-7:30pm

With:

Mary Ann Caws is the translator of Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final texts by the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca. She is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text.

Julian Semilian (Translator of Inventor of Love) is a poet, translator, novelist and filmmaker. He was born in Romania and currently teaches film editing at the North Carolina School of the Arts, after a twenty-four-year career as a film editor in Hollywood.

Laura Semilian (Translator of Inventor of Love) is a soprano soloist and translator.

Allan Graubard‘s poems appeared in the recent Shamanic Warriors, Now Poets (edited by Ira Cohen and J.N. Reilly) and Celestial Graffiti (edited by Ira Cohen).

Live music by Martian Wallace

Manhattan Inn
632 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY

No, Dear Issue 9: Nine Launch Reading

Friday, May 25 7pm

Readers from Issue 9 include:

Hanna Andrews
Julian Brolaski
Iris Cushing
B.C. Edwards
Seth Graves
Austin LaGrone
Gracie Leavitt
Anne Marie Rooney
Paige Taggart
Brian Trimboli
Amber West

Pete’s Candy Store
709 Lorimer St, Brooklyn, NY

–Stephanie Ann Whited

The second adaptation, Black Dog, Red Dog from Stephen Dobyn, boasts Olivia Wilde, Chloe Sevigny, and Whoopie Goldberg as cast members. Both films will be created on small budgets with the assistance of students from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Read further at Word & Film, Gawker, and Indie Wire.

-Abby Koski

Kiwao Nomura is one of Japan’s leading contemporary poets, and is also a prolific critic, translator, and essayist on contemporary poetry. In 2007, he organized the Festival of International Poetry: Toward the Pacific Rim, and was a fellow in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2005. Spectacle & Pigsty is the first full collection of Kiwao Nomura’s poetry to be published in English translation. Click over here to read Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s interview with the translators, Gander and Yoshida. If you’re new to Kiwao Nomura’s work, be sure to click here to read Coldfront’s coverage of his reading at the Poets House, which includes his set-list and videos.

Some other recent collections of translated Japanese poetry that might be of interest are Forest of Eyes, Selected Poems of Tada Chimako translated by Jeffrey Angles and Mouth Eats Color-Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa. You can read an interview with Nakayasu conducted by Thomas Fink here and read a snapshot Coldfront did with Nakayasu back in 2009 here. Carnarium Books will publish The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa  translated by Sawako Nakayasu in 2013.

-steven karl

Atlanta’s Coconut Books and Coconut Magazine are back in full effect. Publisher and founding editor Bruce Covey is now accepting submissions for the magazine, one of the first web-based literary journals. Covey has brought on board Gina Myers, Kim Gek Lin Short, Danielle Pafunda, and Laura Solomon as editors. They hope to launch the first new issue this summer.

Coconut Books will offer eight new titles in 2012. Four titles currently available are Molly Brodak’s chapbook The Flood and the following full-length collections–how to survive a hotel fire by Angela Veronica Wong, Desiring Map by Megan Kaminski, and Covey’s Reveal: All Shapes and Sizes, which Coconut is distributing for Bitter Cherry Books. Collections coming in October are: Slope Move by Hanna Andrews, I Am Going to Save Your Life by Christie Ann Reynolds, Like Likeness Renders by Emily Toder, and a new collection by Jenny Boully. In 2013, Coconut Books plans to publish new full-length titles by Serena Chopra, Amber Nelson, Gina Myers, plus their book contest winners and an anthology. They hope to publish one or two more titles, but those are currently top secret. SPD will stock all of the new titles, plus backlist titles by Gina Myers, Reb Livingston, Jen Tynes, Natalie Lyalin, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Look out for these by the end of June.

Finally, Coconut Books is sponsoring two new book prizes. The Joanna Cargill Coconut Book Prize for a First Book and The Elizabeth P. Braddock Coconut Book Prize (open to any poet with one or more previously published full-length collection). The deadline for both contests is June 30, 2012 before 6 PM EST. Covey and crew are not charging reading fees. Winners receive 25 copies of the finished book and 50% of all net profits (i.e., dollars earned by the press above total production, editorial, and marketing costs) earned by the book. Visit Coconut on Facebook for the full guidelines.

–Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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Poetry Northwest launches their new issue at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 9 at The Liberty Bar (517 15th Ave. E.). Readers include Katherine Larson & Richard Kenney, w/Vis-a-Vis Society.

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Seattle Poetry Watch: Farmers market poetry cheese installment.

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“Two if by sea.”

–Crystal Curry