Wednesday, February 10th: ON Contemporary Practice, Volume 2

Please join Michael Cross and readers for the launch of ON Contemporary Practice volume 2, a magazine devoted to writings on the practices of one's contemporaries edited by Kyle Schlesinger, Thom Donovan, and Michael Cross. Among those reading include the following:

David Brazil
Brandon Brown
Taylor Brady
Jocelyn Saidenberg
Robin Tremblay-McGaw
Dan Thomas-Glass
Alli Warren
Suzanne Stein
Laura Moriarty

Copies of ON2 will also be for sale, the contents of which include writings by David Brazil on Brandon Brown, Robin Tremblay-McGaw on Jocelyn Saidenberg, Dan Thomas-Glass on TAXT Press, Laura Moriarty on Conceptualist practices in poetics, Rich Ownes on Conceptualism and Flarf, Thom Donovan on Bhanu Kapil, Evelyn Reilly on contemporary women's writing after Rosmarie Waldrop, Corina Copp on Poets Theater with special reference to the work of Rodrigo Toscano, Robert Dewhurst on Dorothea Lasky, Brian Whitener on Dolores Dorantes, Michael Cross on "social sculpture" in the work of Judith Goldman and Jennifer Scappettone, Robert Kocik and Michelle Taransky on Stacy Szymaszek, CA Conrad and Brenda Iijima on the "poetics of dirt," and much else.

Thursday, February 18th: Poetry Flash presents Camille Dungy and Robin Ekiss

Camille Dungy has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation of Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been a Tennessee William's Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Workshop, Artist-in-Residence at Rocky Mountain National Park and was a finalist for the 2002 A Room of Her Own Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. A graduate of Stanford University and the MFA program at UNC-Greensboro, Dungy is now Assistant Professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, VA. She has been published in various literary magazines and journals, including recently, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Mid-American Review.

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers, Robin Ekiss's poems and prose have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, APR, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, VQR , and elsewhere. She's received grants, awards, and scholarships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her first book of poems, The Mansion of Happiness, was recently published by the University of Georgia Press VQR Poetry Series.

Tuesday, February 23rd: Leslie Scalapino and Amy McClure

Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, by Leslie Scalapino, is published by Starcherone, February 2010, 168 pages.

The extraordinary range of imagination on display in this slim gem engages as many wildly disparate and imaginatively scenes and situations as a massive Pynchon novel -- miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more. These narratives or moments of riveting meaning arrive out of inchoate states--an alexia where unknown words create a future--and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's dazzling gifts with language and the seemingly endless paths and potentials she has exploded in Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows.

In Space in Situ a book of Amy Evans McClure's art, is published by O Books. Thirty-four color photographs of ceramic sculptures, with an essay by editor for Art in America, Michael Duncan, and poetry by Michael McClure. Evans McClure's sculptures, such as horse heads (one can whirl, some are on wheels), tall winged Stelae Furies the parts of an outdoor installation, figures of Hathor and of a seated Egyptian scribe (installed in the Bancroft Library), abstracted features like vitalism in dreams, led Michael Duncan to compare Evans McClure to "fellow contemporary image-builders" Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois. Her figures are as if silent containers of language, a relation then supplied by the essay and by Michael McClure's poem citing the ceramic forms as containers of her immediate actions: "THEN YOU GLAZE / these shapings from long, / sudden childhood memories."

Wednesday, March 3rd: Ralph Metzner

Ralph Metzner, Ph.D. is a recognized pioneer in psychological, philosophical and cross-cultural studies of consciousness and its transformations. He collaborated with Leary and Alpert in classic studies of psychedelics at Harvard University in the 1960s, co-authored The Psychedelic Experience and was editor of The Psychedelic Review. He is a psychotherapist and Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he was also the Academic Dean for ten years in the 1980s. His books include The Unfolding Self, The Well of Remembrance, Green Psychology,  The Expansion of Consciousness, Alchemical Divination and Mind Space and Time Stream. He is the editor of two collections of essays on the pharmacology, anthropology and phenomenology of ayahuasca and of psilocybin mushrooms. He is also the president and co-founder of the Green Earth Foundation, dedicated to healing and harmonizing the relations between humanity and the Earth.

Thursday, March 4th: Nona Willis Aronowitz

What do young women care about? What are their hopes, worries, and ambitions? Have they heard of feminism, and do they relate to it? These are just some of the questions journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz and photographer Emma Bee Bernstein set out to answer in Girldrive.

In October 2007, Aronowitz and Bernstein set out on a cross-country road trip, meeting with nearly 200 women to discuss their thoughts and feelings about the issues that mattered to them-and about feminism. The result of these interviews, Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism (Seal Pressr 2009), is a regional chronicle of the struggles, concerns, successes, and insights of young women who are grappling-just as hard as their mothers and grandmothers did-to find, define, and fight for gender equity.

Aronowitz and Bernstein, both daughters of Second Wave feminists, specifically set out to speak to women who've made feminism their life's work, as well as those who hadn't given feminism much thought. The result is a smart, thoughtful, and uncensored portrayal of a cross-section of women whose opinions and feelings on feminism are as diverse as their backgrounds and areas of interest.

Featuring well-known feminist activists such as Andi Zeisler (co-founder of Bitch Magazine) and activist and Chicana feminist Martha Cotera, along with stay-at-home moms, blue-collar workers, and college students, Girldrive is a truly diverse compilation of women's reflections on gender and politics and how the two intertwine with race, class, and geographical experiences. Girdrive seamlessly merges all of this with photos (mostly taken by Bernstein) and short diary entries that give context to their couch-surfing, city-hopping, and soul-searching road journey across the United States

Thursday, March 11th: Poetry Flash presents Nin Andrews and Sally Ashton

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.

Sally Ashton is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art (www.dmqreview.com). She earned her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars in 2003 and is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship, Poetry, from Arts Council Silicon Valley. She is the author of These Metallic Days. Poetry and reviews have appeared in Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, failbetter.com , Mississippi Review, and in Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she teaches poetry workshops. She also teaches at San José State University.

Thursday, April 1: Poetry Flash presents Molly Fisk and Rebecca Foust

Molly Fisk was born in San Francisco. She earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College/Harvard University, her M.B.A. from Simmons College Graduate School of Management, and began writing at the age of 35. She's the author of Listening to Winter, Terrain (with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer), the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems and the CD of radio commentary Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace.

All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song recently won the Many Mountains Moving Book Award and will be released in April 2010. Also forthcoming in 2010 is God, Seed, a book of environmental poetry with watercolors by a local artist. Rebecca Foust's chapbooks, Mom's Canoe and Dark Card won the Robert Phillips Poetry Prizes in 2007 and in 2008, and her poetry is or will be published in Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere.

Wednesday, April 7th: Suzanne Jill Levine and Stephen Kessler

Suzanne Jill Levine, director of Translation Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, is general editor of Penguin Classics' five-volume series of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, which will be published this year. An eminent translator, scholar and critic of Latin American literature, her books including a literary biography of Manuel Puig and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, reissued recently by Dalkey Archive Press.

Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist, editor and novelist.  He is the author of eight books and chapbooks of original poetry, most recently Burning Daylight; fourteen books of literary translation, most recently Desolation of the Chimera: Last Poems by Luis Cernuda; a book of essays, Moving Targets: On Poets, Poetry & Translation; and a novel, The Mental Traveler.

After reading various unconvincing English versions of Spanish and Latin American poets, in the early 1970s he made his first serious attempts at literary translation.  In subsequent years he has earned high praise for his versions of Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Vicente Aleixandre, novelists Fernando Alegría and Ariel Dorfman, and such internationally acclaimed poets and prose writers as Julio Cortázar, Mahmoud Darwish, Raymond Queneau, Ernesto Cardenal, César Vallejo and Luis Cernuda, among others, and been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lambda Literary Award for his translation of Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda.

Wednesday, April 14th: Jack Bowen

If You Can Read This is a witty and entertaining exploration of the philosophical ideas reflected in 150 of the most popular bumper stickers.  Author Jack Bowen believes that philosophy is all around us and that something as ordinary as a bumper sticker can open us up to new ways of grappling with a wide assortment of issues.  He argues that (almost) every bumper sticker, no matter how offensive or seemingly inane, holds at least a kernel of truth.  

Jack Bowen teaches philosophy at Menlo School in Atherton, California, and runs the Stanford Summer Philosophy Camp.  He will be featured along with Richard Dawkins and Leonard Susskind in an upcoming documentary titled "The Nature of Existence."  A charismatic presenter, he speaks frequently on philosophy-related subjects.  His first book, a philosophical novel titled The Dream Weaver, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller.  He lives in California.

Thursday, April 15th: Poetry Flash presents Barbara Ras

Barbara Ras was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1949, and educated at Simmons College and at the University of Oregon where she received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing.

Her first collection of poems, Bite Every Sorrow (LSU Press, 1998), was chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award. In his citation, Williams said: "Barbara Ras's poems are informed by a metaphysically erudite and whimsical intelligence...her verbal expertise and lucidity are as bright and surprising as her knowledge of the world is profound. This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning."

Bite Every Sorrow was subsequently awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 1999, Ras was named Georgia Poet of the Year.

Her other books of poetry include One Hidden Stuff (2006) and The Lask Skin (2010). She is also the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 1994).

Ras has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has taught at writing programs across the country and has been on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ras currently lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press.

Thursday, April 29th: Poetry Flash presents Lee Ann Brown and Laynie Browne

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan in 1963 and was raised in Charlotte, NC. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, The Sleep that Changed Everything, and Polyverse (which received the New American Poetry Series Award), a song cycle, The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, as well as numerous chapbooks and journal publications. Her poetry is widely anthologized.

Amelia Stein

Friday, May 7th: Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle is an internationally bestselling writer. His first three novels--The Commitments, The Snapper, and the 1991 Booker Prize finalist The Van --are known as The Barrytown Trilogy. He is also the author of the novels Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993 Booker Prize winner), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and A Star Called Henry, and a non-fiction book about his parents, Rory & Ita. Doyle has also written for the stage and the screen: the plays Brownbread, War, Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors; the film adaptations of The Commitments as co-writer, The Snapper, and The Van; When Brendan Met Trudy (an original screenplay); the four-part television series Family for the BBC; and the television play Hell for Leather. Roddy Doyle has also written the children's books The Giggler Treatment, Rover Saves Christmas, and The Meanwhile Adventures and contributed to a variety of publications including magazine and several anthologies. He lives in Dublin.

In The Dead Republic, Doyle picks up where the second book of the trilogy, Oh, Play That Thing (2004) left off: saved from death in California's Monument Valley by none other than Henry Fonda, Henry is befriended by legendary director John Ford. Ford, enamored with Henry, tells him he would like to film his life. After several years spent in Los Angeles working on the script, Henry flies back to Ireland in 1951 for the filming of The Quiet Man. Much to his consternation, the film has been completely sentimentalized and in no way resembles his own story. He severs ties with Ford, but not before nearly strangling him to death.

Henry eventually settles into a quiet life in a small village north of Dublin, where he finds work as a caretaker for a boy's school. Here, he begins to see the new Ireland unfolding--it's not perfect, but there's electricity and sick boys are cared for. He takes up with a woman named Missus O'Kelly, whom he suspects (but is not quite sure) may be his long-lost wife, the legendary Miss O'Shea. One day, on a visit to Dublin in 1974, a bomb planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force goes off on a street that Henry is walking down. He survives, but is gravely injured. When a newspaper article is published about him, the secret of his rebel past is out: he is Henry Smart again, national hero. New "friends" want to meet him now, though, and Henry quickly finds himself in a compromised position.

Written with Doyle's trademark wit, lyricism and passion, readers will no doubt embrace this moving conclusion to his ambitious trilogy that paired history and fiction and introduced an unforgettable character.

Wednesday, June 2nd: David Lehman

A native New Yorker, David Lehman is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher. If you count the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry (of which he is the series editor), he has three new books this fall. Yeshiva Boys, his latest collections of poems, is out in November from Scribner. The long title poem consists of twelve sections; Lehman began the poem in 1988 and completed it eighteen years later.

In October 2009, Lehman's homage to such songwriters as Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern was published by Schocken / Nextbook. The book is entitled A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. Following the publication of the book, Lehman has been presenting "lectures with musical illustrations" in New York, Chicago, London, San Francisco, and other places.

Lehman's earlier books of poetry include When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. The Daily Mirror is subtitled "a journal in poetry," as is The Evening Sun; both books reflect Lehman's habit of writing a poem a day, a project he undertook as an experiment in 1996; he surprised himself by following through on this project for five years. Poems by David Lehman have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, Boulevard, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other journals.  His articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared widely. He reviewed books regularly for Newsweek in the 1980s and was a contributing editor of Partisan Review for ten years.

Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003) among other anthologies. Among his six nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday), Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Simon and Schuster), and The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (University of Michigan Press). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and is the editor-in-chief of The Best American Poetry blog. He lives in New York City.