January 20: Barry McCrea and Mark Oppenheimer

Barry McCrea has taught comparative literature at Yale since 2004. His novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005; Brandon 2008), won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. It was nominated for an American Library Association Stonewall prize and for a Lambda award and was excerpted in the London Independent on Sunday and the Spanish daily El País. The First Verse was published in Spanish as Literati (DestinoLibro, 2007), and in German as Die Poeten der Nacht (Aufbau, 2008). He is currently working on a second academic book on firstness in fiction, provisionally entitled First Novels, Final Farewells.

Mark Oppenheimer, the editor of the New Haven Review (online at newhavenreview.com), writes for the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, The American Scholar, and other publications. He is the author of two books: Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He will be reading from the manuscript of his forthcoming memoir, Wisenheimer: Memories of an Articulate Childhood. He lives in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven, and you can read more about him at markoppenheimer.com.

Yale's (and Ordinary Evening's) Elizabeth Alexander to read at Inauguration!

For the first time since 1997, a poet will read at the Inauguration. President-elect Barack Obama's Inauguration committee has chosen Elizabeth Alexander, from Yale, to read. We at Ordinary Evening Reading Series are thrilled, not just because millions will get to hear this fabulous poet, but also because we get to hear her again. She read for us on May 15, 2007. So do join us for the Spring 2009 series--you never know, an Inaugural speaker might be there!

December 16th: Charles Barber and Patricia Volk

Charles Barber is the author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (coming out in paperback in February 2009) and the memoir, Songs from the Black Chair. He was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in New York City shelters for the homeless mentally ill. The title essay of Songs from the Black Chair won a 2006 Pushcart Prize and the book itself received a Connecticut Book Award in 2006. Comfortably Numb was released in 2008 to national media attention, including appearances on The Early Show and Fresh Air. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and Scientific American Mind, among other publications, and on NPR. He has taught nonfiction writing at Wesleyan University. He is a senior administrator at The Connection, an innovative social services agency, and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

Patricia Volk's most recent work is the novel, To My Dearest Friends. She has also written the memoir Stuffed, a novel White Light, and two collections of short stories, All It Takes and The Yellow Banana. She has published stories, book reviews, and essays in dozens of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York, The New Yorker, Playboy, and GQ. She was a weekly columnist for New York Newsday, and lives in New York City.

November 18: Martha Southgate and Elizabeth Edelglass

Short stories by Elizabeth Edelglass have appeared in journals including Michigan Quarterly Review (winner of the Lawrence Foundation Prize), Lilith (winner of their short story contest), American Literary Review (second prize winner in their short fiction contest), Passages North (nominated for Best New American Voices), New Haven Review, Peregrine, Kalliope, and others. Her story “Floating Away” won the William Saroyan Centennial Prize and is forthcoming in the Saroyan Society journal In The Grove. She has been a Fiction Fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and has been a finalist or semi-finalist for an assortment of national writing awards, including finalist in two Glimmer Train short story contests. She will read a selection from her work in progress, The Same Map, a collection of connected stories that explores inner conflict along with family strife as an extended Jewish American family advances from the immigrant experience in 1924 Newark to assimilated lives in post-9/11 Connecticut, with travels along the way to the Midwest, California, and Hasidic Brooklyn. Elizabeth is the Director of the Department of Jewish Education Library of Greater New Haven, located at the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge.

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left, which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was shortlisted for both the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence. She was the Associate Chair of the Writing Department at Eugene Lang College at New School University and has taught there as well. She now teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Schedule for Fall 2008

For Fall 2008, the Ordinary Evening Reading Series is thrilled to present an array of extra-ordinary writers reading on an ordinary Tuesday night at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven).

Join us on
September 15 for Eugenia Kim and Tim Parrish
October 20 for Deborah Applegate and Adam Braver
November 17 for Susan McCallum Smith and Adrienne Kane
December 15 for April Bernard and Jude Stewart


We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

October 14: Jonathan Spence and Lisa Sanders

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is excited to present non-fiction writers Lisa Sanders and Jonathan Spence on Tuesday October 14 to brighten your Autumn evening with tales of medical deeds (and misdeeds) and life in 17th century China.

Lisa Sanders, M.D. is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and a clinician educator in Yale’s Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency program. She writes the popular "Diagnosis" column which appears monthly in The New York Times Magazine. The popular Fox television show “House M.D.” was inspired by her column and she now serves as a technical advisor for the show. At Yale, Dr. Sanders’ research and practice focus on the treatment of overweight and obese patients and she is the author of The Perfect Fit Diet: How to Lose Weight, Keep it Off And Still Eat the Foods You Love.

Before entering medical school, Lisa was an Emmy Award-winning producer at CBS News, where she covered medicine and health. She is currently writing a book, titled Diagnosis, in which she looks at how doctors make, and sometimes don’t make, the right diagnosis.

Professor Jonathan Spence teaches at Yale in the field of Chinese history from around 1600 to the present, and on Western images of China since the middle ages. His most recent book is Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (2007).

A past president of the American Historical Association, Jonathan is recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Chinese civilization from the 16th century to the present, and has written extensively on the role of history in shaping modern China. His critically acclaimed book The Search for Modern China has become one of the standard texts on the last several hundred years of Chinese history. He has written and published extensively, including a biography of Mao Zedong and Treason by the Book, which explores an intriguing episode of 18th-century history.

A native of England, Spence holds a bachelor's degree from Cambridge University and master's and doctoral degrees from Yale. His many honors include the Los Angeles Times History Prize in 1982, fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and membership to the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1988. In June 2001, he was made a Companion of the Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, an honor given by the Queen of England for outstanding achievement.

September 16: Alice Mattison and Cameron Gearen

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is proud to inaugurate its Fall 2008 program with readings by novelist (and Ordinary Evening co-curator) Alice Mattison and poet Cameron Gearen.

Alice Mattison—one of the four organizers of the Ordinary Evening series—will read from her new novel, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, which will be published by HarperCollins on September 16, the day of her reading. An excerpt appeared recently in The New Yorker. Alice’s most recent book, In Case We’re Separated: Connected Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2005 and won the Connecticut Book Award for fiction. She is the author of four other novels and three other collections of stories. She lives in New Haven and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont, and in the Fine Arts Work Center summer workshops in Provincetown, MA.

Cameron Gearen was born in New Haven and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. She has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative to Day that was selected by Robert Pinsky (2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Contest in 2001 and the 2005 Lynda Hull Prize from Crazyhorse. She currently teaches in the English Department at Hamden Hall Country Day School.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is on Summer Vacation

Hi - We've sent the Reading Series on vacation after a stellar reading by Wally Lamb (see what the New Haven Independent had to say about it here). Our Fall schedule begins on September 16th with readings by our co-curator Alice Mattison and poet Cameron Gearen.

We hope you'll be able to drop by!

May 20: Jason Shinder Poetry Reading and Wally Lamb

We sadly note the passing in April of Jason Shinder, a gifted poet, gentle soul, and good friend, after a tenacious battle with cancer. For the May 20th event, we will read a few of his poems, and then turn the evening over to Wally Lamb.

Jason Shinder's most recent poetry books are Among Women and Arrow Breaking Apart. A recipient of 2007 poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and elsewhere. His other books include Best American Movie Writing; Writers on Therapy, The Poem That Changed America; "Howl" Fifty Years Later, and the forthcoming The Poem I Turn To: Actors, Directors & other Moviemakers Present Poems That Inspire Them. He was the founder/director of the YMCA National Writer's Voice, YMCA Arts & Humanities, and the Gibson Music International Program, and taught in the graduate writing program at Bennington College. His work within the filmmaking community has included the directing of the Arts Writing Program at Sundance Institute.

Wally Lamb’s third novel, The Hour I First Believed (HarperCollins, forthcoming) explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events as the Civil War, Boston’s 1942 Coconut Grove nightclub fire, and the Columbine High School shootings of 1999. His first two novels, She’s Come Undone (Simon and Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. Wally has also edited the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays that evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present.

A Connecticut native, Wally holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree from Vermont College. He has taught at Norwich Free Academy and the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department’s creative writing program.

Wally has received a host of awards, including the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award and Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He and his wife, Christine, are the parents of three sons, Jared, Justin, and Teddy.

April 29: Ann Hood and Dana Kinstler

Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of the novel The Knitting Circle and the forthcoming memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Bon Appetit, Traveler, and many more publications. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, The Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.

Dana Kinstler won the Southern Indiana Review’s fiction prize in 2007, and The Missouri Review Editor’s prize in 2000. Her fiction has been published in Salamander Review and the Mississippi Review. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Stella Magazine section of the Sunday London Telegraph, and in the anthologies: My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren and Everyone in Between, Mr. Wrong, About Face, and Feed Me. She grew up in New York City and now lives in the Hudson River Valley, New York with her husband and two daughters.

Ordinary Evening Schedule for Spring 2008

The Spring 2008 Ordinary Evening Reading Series continues, with an array of extra-ordinary writers reading on an ordinary Tuesday night at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven). Join us on
January 22 for Joshua Beckman and Vivian Shipley
February 26 for Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl
March 25 for Rachel Pastan and Jack Hitt
April 29 for Ann Hood and Dana Kinstler
May 20 for Jason Schinder and Wally Lamb

We'll see you there --

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Presents Nonfiction Writer Jack Hitt and Novelist Rachel Pastan, Tuesday March. 25, 7PM

Get an early taste of spring with fresh new works by award-winning journalist Jack Hitt and novelist Rachel Pastan on Tuesday, March 25, 7pm, at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs), 272 College Street at Chapel.

"I guess most of us are condemned to see nothing more than the easy comedy of chickens. But Susan Vitucci saw something else: their potential greatness. Their hidden beauty. Their grandeur."

- from "Chicken Diva", about an opera based on Chicken Little, This American Life by Jack Hitt

"'She wants to nurse,' Jane said.

'Didn't you just nurse her?' Laura asked, handing the baby back.Jane felt a sting, as though Laura had criticized her. What did Laura, with her thin bra strap and her round recreational breasts know about anything?

'Her stomach is the size of a walnut,' she said lightly, lifting her shirt...She was glad to have Maisie back in her arms where she belonged. Nothing was sweeter than holding her daughter, except for all the times she longed to put her down."

- from Lady of the Snakes, by Rachel Pastan

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the public radio program, This American Life. Recently, his work was chosen by Jamaica Kincaid for inclusion in Best American Travel Essays and by Atul Gawande for Best American Science Writing. His radio program for This American Life entitled "Habeas Schmabeas" won the 2007 Peabody Award.

Harcourt published Rachel Pastan's second novel, Lady of the Snakes, in January. Her first novel, This Side of Married (Viking), appeared in 2004 and was recognized by the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. A former Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellow, she currently teaches at Swarthmore College and the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives with her family near Philadelphia. For more information, please visit her website: http://www.rachelpastan.com/.

Ordinary Evening's remaining Spring 2008 lineup features writers from the "Mr. Wrong" Anthology, Ann Hood and Dana Kinstler (4/29); and novelist Wally Lamb with poet Jason Shinder (5/20). Please join us! Read writers' biographies, find links, send us an email, and more at http://ordinaryevening.blogspot.com/.

ABOUT THE ORDINARY EVENING SERIES
Started in spring 2005, Ordinary Evening features writers in a monthly reading at the Anchor Bar Mermaid Room, downstairs. Borrowing its name from the poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" by Wallace Stevens, the series aims to bring writers and audiences together in a no-fuss, informal environment in the Elm City to enjoy a little written word on a work-night. Readings are always on a Tuesday at 7pm, free of charge, both drinkers and teetotalers welcome.

Poets Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl Read on Tuesday, February 26

ORDINARY EVENING READING SERIES PRESENTS
POETS RICHARD DEMING AND NANCY KUHL
Tuesday, February 26, 7pm


Join us for an unconventional Valentine's Day celebration with a reading from poets (and married couple) Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl on Tuesday, February 26, 7pm, at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs), 272 College Street at Chapel.

Choose this place, its dogged vacancies
and when someone walks in, here begins:
the distance pressed, the minute before grew an inch,
now closer in--arms and legs shoot out so
the body is an x, a beckoning.
How's that for sincerity?...

- from "Rooms (1)" by Richard Deming


I am. I am. Falling. Like the downward
stroke of a paintbrush, like a river turned
cataract. People who fall

find each other by bends where
bones didn't heal right, by scabs,
by swellings and scars...
- from "Pyramid" by Nancy Kuhl


Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His first book of poems is Let's Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008). He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford University Press, 2008). With Nancy Kuhl he edits Phylum Press.

Nancy Kuhl is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Wife of the Left Hand (Shearsman Books, 2007). Her chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines.

She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where she curates the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series. She is the author of two exhibition catalogs, Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts and Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women, which are distributed by the University Press of New England.

March 25: Rachel Pastan and Jack Hitt

Harcourt published Rachel Pastan’s second novel, Lady of the Snakes, in January. Her first novel, This Side of Married (Viking), appeared in 2004 and was recognized by the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. A former Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow, she currently teaches at Swarthmore College and the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives with her family near Philadelphia. For more information, and to read Chapter One of her novel, please visit her website: www.rachelpastan.com.

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the public radio program, This American Life. Recently, his work was chosen by Jamaica Kincaid for inclusion in Best American Travel Essays and by Atul Gawande for Best American Science Writing. His radio program for This American Life entitled "Habeas Schmabeas" won the 2007 Peabody Award.

January 22: Joshua Beckman and Vivian Shipley

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of five books, including Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

Vivian Shipley is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and the editor of Connecticut Review from Southern Connecticut State University. She has published five chapbooks and her seventh book of poems, Hardboot: Poems New & Old, (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2005) won the 2006 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2006 Connecticut Press Club Prize for Best Creative Writing. She has won a vast number of prizes, and two of her poetry collections have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2007, she was inducted into the University of Kentucky Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame. A new book of poetry, All of Your Message Have Been Erased, is forthcoming from Southeastern Louisiana University Press.

What They Say About Ordinary Evening

The attached article discusses the November 2006 Ordinary Evening readings -- check our listings for Spring 2008 to see what's coming up!

February 26: Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl

Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His first book of poems is Let's Not Call It Consequence(Shearsman, 2008). He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford University Press, 2008). With Nancy Kuhl he edits Phylum Press.

Nancy Kuhl is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Wife of the Left Hand (Shearsman Books, 2007). Her chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines.

She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where she curates the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series. She is the author of two exhibition catalogs, Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts and Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women, which are distributed by the University Press of New England.