Gabriel Gudding and Rosanna Warren Read on December 19th

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series closes out 2006 with readings by two terrific poets, Gabriel Gudding and Rosanna Warren, on December 19th at 7pm in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs at 272 College St., New Haven). We hope you'll take some time from the busy holiday season and join us.

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and rhode island notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming 2008), which was written entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence, Rhode Island and Normal, Illinois. A resident of Normal, Illinois since 2002, he's an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Illinois State University, teaching "experimental poetry." Gabriel's work has appeared in such venues as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and has been anthologized in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He is a trained mediator for Illinois State, has begun two creative writing programs in prisons, and maintains a blog, Conchology.

Rosanna Warren was born in Connecticut in 1953. She was educated at Yale (BA 1976) and Johns Hopkins (MA 1980). She is the author of one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981), and three collections of poems: Each Leaf Shines Separate (Norton, 1984), Stained Glass (Norton, 1993), and Departure (Norton, 2003). She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voice from the Field (Northeastern, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With her husband, Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides' Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1992). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Readers? Digest Fund, among others. Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets' Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004-2005 she was president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. She is Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Brings You a Special Gift: Two December Readings!

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is celebrating the holiday season with two readings in December, on the 5th and the 19th. Both will occur at 7pm downstairs at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (272 College St., New Haven). December 5th features three poets: Bruce Covey, P.F. Potvin, and Reb Livingston. Two more poets, the experimental poet Gabriel Gudding and the noted Rosanna Warren, will read on December 19th.

Bruce Covey is Lecturer of Creative Writing at Emory University and the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and the forthcoming Ten Pins, Ten Frames (Front Room, Michigan) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books). His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming in 26, Verse, LIT, Bombay Gin, Boog City, 580 Split, and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series in Atlanta.

Michigander P.F. Potvin is a writer, musician, and ultra-marathon runner. His prosy book, The Attention Lesson, which chronicles adventures in Patagonia, New Zealand, Europe and the U.S., is forthcoming from No Tell Press. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he received the Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship. Other scholarships include the Vermont Studio Center and the Catskill Poetry Conference. His writing has appeared in Born Magazine, Boston Review, Sentence, Black Warrior Review, Pierogi Press, and No Tell Motel. He also serves on the editorial board of Drunken Boat.

Reb Livingston is the author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, forthcoming) and Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2006 and literary magazines. Along with Carly Sachs, she curates the Washington DC-based reading series, Lolita and Gilda's Burlesque Poetry Hour.

A Brace of Poets for November 7th's Ordinary Evening Reading Series

In the bracing November air, please join the Ordinary Evening Reading Series on Tuesday, November 7, at 7pm, downstairs at the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room (272 College St, New Haven) to hear two exciting poets from both coasts.

Ed Skoog's poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Slate, and other journals in the U.S. and England. He has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, and in 2005 won the William Faulkner Prize for Poetry from the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Society in New Orleans. He lives in southern California.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of This Body of Silk, which won the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, The Wedding Boat (Owl Creek Press), as well as The Leaving: New and Selected Poems and The Golden Hour, both published by Autumn House; she is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. She has been a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Visiting Writer at Central Connecticut State University, and Poet-in-Residence at SUNY Binghamton and at the Frost place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her poetry has been widely anthologized including in Garrison Keillor's nationally syndicated radio show Writer's Almanac. Formerly of Mystic, Connecticut, she has just moved to Maryland, where she works as a writer and editor.

October 3rd: Short-Story Writer Paul Beckman and Poet Jen Tynes Read at The Anchor Bar

On Tuesday October 3rd at 7:00 PM, please join the Ordinary Evening Reading Series to welcome fiction writer Paul Beckman and poet Jen Tynes to the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room.

Paul Beckman is a writer who lives in Madison, CT. His short stories, four of which have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, have appeared in both print and on-line journals (among them, Playboy, Currents, Connecticut Review, Mad Hatter's Review, and Exquisite Corpse). His first collection, Come! Meet My Family and Other Stories was published in 1995 by Weighted Anchor Press, and a second volume is expected in 2006. Paul's work has been published in New Zealand, translated into German for an anthology entitled Humor by Jewish Writers ("The P Word"), and several of his short stories have been adapted into plays.

Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits horse less press. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Diagram, CutBank, H_NGM_N, Typo, Octopus, Verse, No Tell Motel, The Cultural Society, and other journals. Her first book, The End Of Rude Handles, is available from Red Morning Press.

12/19: Gabriel Gudding & Rosanna Warren

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and rhode island notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming 2008), which was written entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence, Rhode Island and Normal, Illinois. A resident of Normal, Illinois since 2002, he's an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Illinois State University, teaching "experimental poetry." Gudding's work has appeared in such venues as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and has been anthologized in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He is a trained mediator for Illinois State, has begun two creative writing programs in prisons, and maintains a blog, Conchology.

Rosanna Warren is the author of Departure (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003); Stained Glass (1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984); and Snow Day (1981). She has also published a translation of Euripides's Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995) and edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989). Her many awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the May Sarton Prize, among others, and she received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was The New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the poetry editor of Daedalus. Currently, she is the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.

2006 Ordinary Evening Schedule

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series was created to bring emerging and established poets and writers to New Haven, and to enrich the already robust artistic, cultural, and literary scene in the Elm City.

The readings always take place on a Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room. For now, you’ll have to settle for one reading a month. Seating is limited so get there early!

If you have a question about the reading series, please email

curator.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

If you’d like to receive announcements about upcoming readings, please email

news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

Here’s the reading schedule through 2006. Click on the links to learn more about the readers and visit this site frequently for updates and news:


12/5
Bruce Covey, P.F. Potvin, & Reb Livingston

12/19
Gabriel Gudding and Rosanna Warren

Past Readers:

11/7
Ed Skoog and Sue Ellen Thompson

10/3
Jen Tynes and Paul Beckman

9/19
Shanna Compton, Jennifer L. Knox, and Ada Limón

August - Vacation!

7/18
Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, and Shafer Hall

6/20
Edward Schwarzschild and Laurel Snyder

5/16
Robin Beth Schaer and Ravi Shankar

4/18
David Amsden and Tom Bissell

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series resumes on September 19 at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room with Shanna Compton, Ada Limón, and Jennifer L. Knox

Please join us on Tuesday, September 19, at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room for the next installment of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series, featuring the following excellent poets:

Shanna Compton is the author of Down Spooky (poems, Winnow, 2005) and the editor of GAMERS (essays on video games, Soft Skull, 2004). Her poems can be found in Foursquare, Ping-Pong, the tiny, Tool, Abraham Lincoln, and other magazines, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2005, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, and Bowery Women.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. Her first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book This Big Fake World was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize and is due out in the fall. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jennifer L. Knox was born and raised in Lancaster, California, the largestcity named Lancaster in the world. Her first book of poems, A Gringo LikeMe, is available on Softskull Press. She is a three-time contributor to The Best American Poetry, and her work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present. She is currently studying avian linguistics via correspondence.

7/18: Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, and Shafer Hall

Please join us on Tuesday, July 18, at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room for the next installment of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series, featuring the following excellent poets:

Samuel Amadon is from Hartford. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, New England Review, Verse and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Advice for Young Couples from H_ng M_n B__ks. He will be a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2006-2007.

Stephanie Anderson was born in Berkeley, California and raised (mostly) in Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago. In the Particular Particular was the winner of the 2006 Diagram chapbook contest and will be published by New Michigan Press in the fall. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo. She lives in New York City.

Shafer Hall is a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and is the curator of the Frequency Reading Series. Some of his chapbooks have been published by Rust Buckle and Half Empty/Half Full. Some more will be published by Big Game and B54. His first full-length book, Never Cry Woof, will be published in January by No Tell Press. He is only a spearfisherman in his wildest dreams.

12/5: Bruce Covey, P.F. Potvin, & Reb Livingston

Bruce Covey is Lecturer of Creative Writing at Emory University and the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and the forthcoming Ten Pins, Ten Frames (Front Room, Michigan) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books). His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming from 26, Verse, LIT, Bombay Gin, Boog City, 580 Split, and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series in Atlanta.

Michigander P.F. Potvin is a writer, musician, and ultra-marathon runner. His prosy book, The Attention Lesson, which chronicles adventures in Patagonia, New Zealand, Europe and the U.S., is forthcoming from No Tell Press. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he received the Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship. Other scholarships include the Vermont Studio Center and the Catskill Poetry Conference. His writing has appeared in Born Magazine, Boston Review, Sentence, Black Warrior Review, Pierogi Press, and No Tell Motel. He also serves on the editorial board of Drunken Boat.

Reb Livingston is the author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, forthcoming) and Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2006 and literary magazines. Along with Carly Sachs, she curates the Washington DC-based reading series, Lolita and Gilda's Burlesque Poetry Hour.

11/7: Ed Skoog & Sue Ellen Thompson

Ed Skoog’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Plougshares, The New Republic, and NO: A Journal of the Arts. A limited edition collection of poems, Field Recordings, was published in 2004 by Seattle’s Lit Rag Press. He recently moved from New Orleans to southern California.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of This Body of Silk, which won the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, and The Wedding Boat (Owl Creek Press), as well as The Leaving: New and Selected Poems and The Golden Hour, both published by Autumn House; she is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. She has been a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Visiting Writer at Central Connecticut State University, and Poet-in-Residence at SUNY Binghamton and at the Frost place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her poetry has been widely anthologized including in Garrison Keillor's nationally syndicated radio show Writer's Almanac. Formerly of Mystic, Connecticut, she recently moved to Maryland, where she works as a writer and editor.

10/3: Aaron Belz and Jen Tynes

Aaron Belz is a PhD candidate in English Literature at St. Louis University. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, McSweeney’s, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jacket, Fence, and the Verse Press Younger American Poets anthology. A full-length manuscript, A Place Where Things Are, was shortlisted for University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham Poetry Prize. His poetry chapbook Plausible Words was published in 2005. Visit his website at belz.net and read some of his recent poetry at www.meaningless.com.

Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits horse less press. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Diagram, CutBank, H_NGM_N, Typo, Octopus, Verse, No Tell Motel, The Cultural Society, and other journals. Her first book, The End Of Rude Handles, is available from Red Morning Press.

9/19: Shanna Compton, Jennifer L. Knox, and Ada Limón

Shanna Compton is not quite as tall as Jennifer L. Knox but she is the author of Down Spooky and the editor of GAMERS: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. Her poems have recently appeared in Spork, The Tiny, Court Green, and the anthologies The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Digerati, and The Best American Poetry 2005. Originally from Texas, she has lived in Brooklyn, NY, since 1995. Please visit her online at www.shannacompton.com.

Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to The Best American Poetry series, as well as the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Her first book of poems, A Gringo Like Me, is available from Soft Skull Press.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including The Iowa Review, Slate, Watchword, Poetry Daily, Tarpaulin Sky, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others. Her first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book This Big Fake World was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize and is due out in the fall. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her new bike and doesn’t have any tattoos.

7/18: Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, and Shafer Hall

Samuel Amadon is from Hartford. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, New England Review, Verse and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Advice for Young Couples from H_ng M_n B__ks. He will be a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2006-2007.

Stephanie Anderson was born in Berkeley, California and raised (mostly) in Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago. In the Particular Particular was the winner of the 2006 Diagram chapbook contest and will be published by New Michigan Press in the fall. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo. She lives in New York City.

Shafer Hall is a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and is the curator of the Frequency Reading Series. Some of his chapbooks have been published by Rust Buckle and Half Empty/Half Full. Some more will be published by Big Game and B54. His first full-length book, Never Cry Woof, will be published in January by No Tell Press. He is only a spearfisherman in his wildest dreams.

6/20: Edward Schwarzschild and Laurel Snyder

Edward Schwarzschild is the author of Responsible Men (Algonquin, 2005), a first novel which received wide acclaim, and was chosen as one of 20 Breakout Books by Amazon.com, 25 Best Books for Book Groups by Kirkus and one of the Best Books of 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle. His next book, a collection of short stories entitled No Rest for the Middleman, will be published by Algonquin in 2007.

Schwarzschild’s fiction and essays have been published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Forward, The Chicago Tribune, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Moment Magazine, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. He was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and he now teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he holds a joint appointment in the English department and the New York State Writers Institute. Learn more about Schwarzschild and his work by visiting www.responsiblemen.com.

Laurel Snyder is the author of a poetry chapbook, Daphne & Jim, and editor of the anthology Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her rants can be found in the Utne Reader, LIT, the Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” as well as the webzine, Killing the Buddha, where she is co-editor.

5/16: Robin Beth Schaer and Ravi Shankar

Please join us on Tuesday, May 16 for the second installment of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series:

Robin Beth Schaer is the Queen of Birds and a third-generation New Yorker. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Rattapallax, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Painted Bride Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Barrow Street. She is the chief online editor at the Academy of American Poets and has taught literature and writing at Columbia University and Cooper Union.

Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in May 2004 and named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards. His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Ambit, Catamaran and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among other publications. He has served as a commentator for NPR, and appeared on KKUP and Wesleyan radio. He currently reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry, due out in Fall 2007. You can read an interview with him at Jacket. He does not play the sitar.

4/18: David Amsden and Tom Bissell

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series welcomes David Amsden and Tom Bissell on Tuesday, April 18 at 7:00 p.m. as the first readers in the series:

David Amsden is the author of the novel Important Things That Don’t Matter. His fiction and nonfiction appear regularly in Slate, Salon, The Believer, Details, and New York, where he is a contributing editor. He is currently working on a personal and repertorial account of kids in their teens and twenties, to be published in 2007.

Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and then as a book editor for W. W. Norton and Henry Holt. He has been a full-time writer since 2001. His first book, Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative about Uzbekistan, was published in 2003, and was followed shortly thereafter by a volume of fake DVD commentaries entitled Speak, Commentary (written with Jeff Alexander). His short story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg appeared in 2005. His book The Father of All Things, a nonfiction account of his journey to Vietnam with his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War, will be published in early 2007.