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.