Wednesday, February 20, 2008

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.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

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.