Tuesday, January 01, 2008

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.