Every week, Coldfront features 5 upcoming readings in New York City. In addition to local events, this week we encourage you to take a trip outside of the concrete jungle into the wilderness known as upstate.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 @ 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Poets of Kenyon Review @ Word for Word
Reading Room, Bryant Park, New York, NY
With readers: David Baker, Menna Alexander, Stanley Plumly
Rain Venue: The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, 20 West 44th Street (between 5th & 6th Avenues)
The Inspired Word
Randall Horton is the author of The Definition of Place and the Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, both from Main Street Rag. Randall is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award and most recently a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. His creative and critical work has most recently appeared in Callaloo, Sou’wester, Caduceus 9 and The Offending Adam: A Journal of New Writing and Poetics. Randall is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a member of The Symphony: The House that Etheridge Built. He has a MFA in Poetry from Chicago State University and a PhD in Creative Writing from SUNY Albany. Randall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven. An excerpt from his memoir Roxbury is forthcoming by Kattywompus Press. Northwestern University Press will publish his latest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy in Fall 2012.
Joel Allegretti is the author of four collections, most recently, Europa/Nippon/New York: Poems/Not-Poems (Poets Wear Prada, 2012). His second book, Father Silicon (The Poet’s Press), was selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006. His poetry has appeared in many national journals, including Smartish Pace, The New York Quarterly and Pank. He wrote the texts for three song cycles by Frank Ezra Levy, whose work is released on Naxos American Classics. Allegretti is a member of the Academy of American Poets and ASCAP.
Richard Garland is an Australian poet who relocated from Sydney to New York City around a year ago. Garland’s recurring themes include isolation, repressed sexual obsession, and nonidentity, through a somewhat “confessional camouflage.” He has started an epic poem based on the blue line, which he hopes to finish by 2013. He is a writer that relishes the performance aspect of poetry – as he intends to lay bare for his audience, metaphorically speaking.
June Fourth Elegies
Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre St, New York, NY
Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was a prominent figure in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Each year since the government crackdown he has commemorated his fellow activists with a poem. Although Liu is currently serving an 11-year jail sentence in China for his political writings, his poems will soon be published in both English and Chinese for the first time in the volume June Fourth Elegies.
Poet, translator, and New Directions editor Jeffrey Yang will read a selection from his translation of June Fourth Elegies. He will be joined by Larry Siems, director of the PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Program, for a discussion on human rights and freedom of expression in contemporary China. RSVP to programs@mocanyc.org.
Thursday, August 2nd, 2012, 8 – 10 p.m.
The Literary Review Reading and Launch
Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
Featured Poets: Cindy Cruz, Geoffrey Nutter, Tanya Paperny, & Martha Witt
Writers read from the Spring 2012 issue of The Literary Review, “Encyclopedia Britannica.” Free beverages will be served. RSVP on Facebook.
Friday, August 3rd, 2012 @ 7pm
Pork and Poetry!
Mt. Tremper Arts Summer Festival
647 South Plank Rd., Mount Tremper, NY 12457
Joe Pan is bringing Brooklyn Arts Press and four other small presses up to the Mount Tremper Arts Festival for a pork roast dinner, a poetry reading, and a Q&A. Small presses include Epiphany, Birds LLC, Fewer & Further Press, and Argos Books. Our readers will be BAP’s Joe Fletcher, Paul Legault, Bianca Stone, & Ana Božičević.
Saturday, August 4, 2012 @2:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Brownstone Poets
Park Plaza Restaurant, 220 Cadman Plaza West, Brooklyn Hts, NY
John Barrale’s poetry has been published in a many literary magazines including the Red Wheel Barrow Poets’ Anthologies (Volumes I – IV, Poetalk, The Lullwater Review, California Quarterly, Tiger’s Eye Journal, Paterson Literary Review, and The William and Mary Review. John has lived in NJ since 1978, and enjoys reading his work in a wide variety of venues throughout the metropolitan area.
Zorida Mohammed was born in Trinidad and immigrated to America at age 18. She is a social worker in Bergen County, NJ. Zorida won the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant for Poetry in 1991-92. Her poems have been published in Folio, Fulcrum # 6 and # 7, Phoebe, The Caribbean Writer, Poem, The Oyez Review, Compass Rose, The Dirty Goat, The Spoon River Review, The Atlanta Review, and The Distillery. She has also been published in The Red Wheelbarrow for the past four years. Zorida is an active member of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and reads frequently in Bergen County, NJ, and in New York City.
Tony Puma’s career in sales/marketing/advertising, and public relations have influenced his poetry style, being less abstract and more to-the-point. Tony has degrees from New York University and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is a member of various poetry groups including: Italian-American Writers Assn., Red Wheelbarrow Poets, Sussex NJ Writers Roundtable, Poets House (NYC), South Mountain Poets, and the Hudson Valley “Poets-on-the-Loose.” His view of life is through the prism of poetry; seeing, hearing, and feeling, trying to capture emotions and relate to them via words. His poems have been featured in a variety of publications. Visit his blog at: tonypoetica.blogspot.com.
- Stephanie Ann Whited
