New York City poets and authors are trickling back into town after the mass Independence Day exodus last week (or maybe it was the heat?). Bask in their holiday afterglow while they’re still chilled out at this week’s five featured readings.

Franklin Park Reading Series – Travels and Journeys
Monday July 9th 2012 @ 8pm
Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden
618 St. Johns Place, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY

In their comic and poignant work, the authors will embark on inner and outward journeys, including road trips uncovering truths about sexual identity, the reclaiming of lost adolescence with a stop in Disney World, and the sordid activities of a pantheon of gods who emerge from a bus blaring the Mister Softee jingle. Free. Drink Special: $4 Pints. BOMB Magazine will create a podcast of the event. Co-sponsored by Small Demons for extra drink discounts, giveaways like coasters and literary maps, and a mix tape drawn from Mark Leyner’s novels.

Authors:

Mark Leyner is the author of the novels Et Tu, Babe, The Tetherballs of Bougainville, and, most recently, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. He has also written several short story collections, including My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller Why Do Men Have Nipples? He cowrote the movie War, Inc. and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Eric Sasson is the author of the story collection Margins of Tolerance, which won the 2011 Tartt Fiction Award. An MFA graduate of NYU, he has taught fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review, The Puritan, Connotation Press, Liquid Imagination, Alligator Juniper, Trans, The Ledge, and other places.

Rupinder Gill is the author of the memoir On The Outside Looking Indian (McClellan, 2011). She has written for The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The National Post, CBC Radio, and the Canadian television comedy This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

Matthue Roth is a performance poet and the author of the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go (Cleis Press, 2011) and the novels Losers, winner of an ALA Rainbow Award, Never Mind the Goldbergs, named an NPL Best Book for the Teen Age, and Candy in Action. His picture book, My First Kafka, is forthcoming from One Peace Books. He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film 1/20. He is publishing his novel Enemies one chapter at a time in a scavenger hunt, and he will be starting graduate school at Brooklyn College in the fall. Also a video game designer, he lives in Brooklyn.

Polly Bresnick‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, The Fiddleback, elimae, LIT, MonkeyBicycle, decomp, The Six Sentence Review, and others. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a section of her visual mistranslation The Odyssey has been published as the chapbook Old Gus Eats by Publishing Genius. Curator and host of the monthly reading series “Writers Reading to Writers Listening to Writers Reading to Writers,” she teaches creative writing to all sorts of people and is searching for a home for her novel.

Southern Writers Reading Series’ Beach Blast
Wednesday July 11th 2012 @ 7:30pm
Happy Ending Lounge
302 Broome Street, Manhattan, NY

It’s summer in the city and once more the Southern Writers Reading Series is preparing for its annual Beach Blast. For ten years now, the series has held its wildly popular “beach” themed reading event where Happy Ending Lounge creates a surprisingly real “sea-scape” in the bar basement.

Featuring:

Catherine Lacey (pictured) is a Mississippian living in Brooklyn. She runs a bed and breakfast called 3B to support her writing habit. She’s working on too many books but has a novel finished. Her work has been in The Believer, The Atlantic.com, elimae, 52 Stories, Lamination Colony, Cousine Corrine’s Reminder, Trnsfr Magazine and other places.

Alex Crowley was named the first recipient of the Paul Viola Prize in poetry in September 2011 and runs the Mental Marginalia reading series at The West Brooklyn.

Amy Meng is an MFA candidate at New York University. She has been published in the North Dakota Quarterly, Conte, and the inaugural issue of Literary Laundry. She cannot bake or keep plants alive so she writes poetry, which is harder to kill. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Will Brewer is an Assistant Editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review.

Poetry from the Rooftops
Thursday July 12 2012 @ 6:30pm
The Arsenal Building at Central Park, 64th Street at 5th Avenue, New York, NY

The Academy of American Poets continues its annual Poetry from the Rooftops free summer reading series atop the historic Arsenal Building in New York City’s Central Park. The Academy collaborates with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation each year to provide an intimate escape from the flow of traffic and offer New Yorkers the opportunity to hear a diverse group of contemporary poets read original work and “bare their brains to heaven.” With poets:

Ariana Reines is the author of  The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007; FenceBooks: 2011), MERCURY (FenceBooks: 2011), and the play TELEPHONE, commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre. In 2009, she became the youngest-ever Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at UC Berkeley and was featured in two special performances at Works+Process at the Guggenheim.

Monica Ferrell was born in 1975 in India. A former Discovery/The Nation prizewinner and Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently teaches in the creative writing program at Purchase College. Her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Tin House, and others. She is the author of the collection of poems “Beasts for the Chase” (2008, Sarabande Books) and the novel The Answer Is Always Yes, (2008, Dial Press). She lives in Brooklyn.

John Yau is a poet, art critic and fiction writer. He is the author of many books of poetry including Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon, 2012) and Corpse and Mirror (Holt Rinehart, 1983), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery. Yau has received numerous awards including the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the American Poetry Review Jerome Shestack Award, and a 1988 New York Foundation for the Arts Award. He is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation. Yau has taught at several universities and was recently the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail. He currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and resides in New York City.

Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Free.

H.I.P. Reading Series – Friday the 13th Edition
Friday July 13th 2012 @ 7pm
Bar on A
170 Avenue A, Manhattan, NY 

Join H.I.P for a bewitching evening of with authors reading their most haunting work.

Featuring:

B.C. Edwards is a producer at The Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York. He was awarded the 2011 Hudson Prize for fiction and is the author of the collections The Aversive Clause (fall 2012) as well as the forthcoming collections of poetry To Mend Small Children, (february 2012) and From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes (fall 2013). He is a regular contributor to BOMBlog and his work can be found in Red Line Blues, The Sink Review, Mathematics Magazine, Hobart and others. He is also a Literary Death Match Champion and has the medal to prove it.

Courtney Maum is the humor columnist behind Electric Literature’s “Celebrity Book Review” and a frequent contributor to Tin House and Bomb Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in lots of lovely places. A Literary Death Match champion, she’s recently won prizes from Hobart, The Cupboard and Folio Magazine. Her short story “Clarins” was a 2011 Million Writers Award notable story. Courtney can be found on Twitter at @cmaum or at courtneymaum.tumblr.com.

Joseph Salvatore has published fiction and criticism in The Brooklyn Rail, Dossier Journal, H.O.W. Journal, LIT, New York Tyrant, Open City, Post Road, Salt Hill, Sleeping Fish, Willow Springs, 110 Stories (NYU Press, 2001), and Routeledge’s Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (2003). He is a frequent fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and an assistant professor at The New School, where he founded their literary journal, LIT, and where he was awarded the University’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He is an associate book review editor for The Brooklyn Rail. His debut collection of short stories, To Assume a Pleasing Shape, from BOA Editions, was published 2011. He lives in New York City.

NOTE: This event is free, and all guests are welcome. Please RSVP via Facebook or email: hipreadingseries@gmail.com.

Diamond Mouth Surprise
Saturday July 14th 2012 @ 8pm
La Sala @ Cantina Royale
58 North 3rd, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

Roberto Carlos Lange is a composer and sound artist born in South Florida and is the son of Ecuadorean immigrants. Growing up he was surrounded by tropical heat and hurricanes that represented the rich colors of sound and people living in South Florida. The sound of bass and late-night “peñas” in and around his house carved a deep foundation into his interest for sound and the things producing them. Roberto records and performs as HELADO NEGRO and OMBRE, a collaboration with Juliannia Barwick. Roberto will be screening a series of recently completed videos pieces.

Jeanann Dara is a Brooklyn based violist, violinist, electronic composer, multimedia artist, and curator.
She received her undergraduate degree from The Juilliard School and her Masters degree in Multimedia Composition at New York University. She is a leading freelance violist playing with ensembles such as Wordless Music Orchestra and is an experienced lecturer with institutions such as UC Irvine, NYU, and festivals throughout Italy, Spain and Romania.

Emily Pettit is the author of Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC) and two chapbooks How (Octopus Books) and What Happened to Limbo (Pilot Books). She is an editor for notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press, as well as the publisher of jubilat. She teaches at Flying Object.

BANANAZZZ tells the inspiring story of Craig Evanhalen, a young man with the hunger and finances for stardom that starts a punk band called BANANAZZZ and uses it to get his message out to the world. However, his giant ego, delusions and insecurity drive him and his band into chaos.

– Stephanie Ann Whited