raise river madhat

river gets raised for two lafayette poets and an international traveling poet, and we are merging with delta journal's highland reading series to add local poets: karah mitchell, samantha bares, and seth leblanc

Born in Hong Kong during the height of the Cultural Revolution, Marc Vincenz has spent most of his life on the road. He has lived in England, Switzerland, Spain, Hong Kong, China, the United States, and has traveled far and wide to such remote locations such as central Siberia, the Amazon Rainforest, Tibet, India’s Thar Desert, and China’s Kun Lun Mountains. After many years of business and travel in the Far East, he finally settled in Shanghai in the 90s.

His work has appeared in many journals both online and in print, including Washington Square  Review, Fourteen Hills, The Canary, The Bitter Oleander, Superstition Review, Crab Creek Review, The Battersea Review, St. Petersburg Review, Tears in the Fence, Pirene’s Fountain, Exquisite  Corpse, The Potomac, Poetry Salzburg Review, Spillway, Stirring, MiPOesias and Guernica. His work has been translated into German, Russian and Romanian. He has been awarded several grants from the Swiss Arts Council for his translations. 

His recent books include The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (2011); Gods of a Ransacked Century (Unlikely Books, 2013), Mao's Mole (Neopoiesis Press, 2013) and forthcoming, Beautiful Rush (Unlikely Books, 2014) and a meta-novel, Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014). A new English- German bi-lingual collection, Additional Breathing Exercises is forthcoming from Wolfbach Verlag, Zurich (2014). He is also completing a spoken-word album to be released by Neuroshell Records, New York. He is Publisher and Executive Editor of MadHat (Mad Hatters’ Review) and MadHat Press and Coeditor-in-Chief of Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

3:AM Interview

In 1998, Jonathan Penton founded the literary electronic magazine Unlikely Stories. Since then, UnlikelyStories.org has grown into a contemporary multimedia journal of sociopolitical and cultural essays, reviews, interviews, criticism, poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, movies, visual art, music, cross-media work, and first-hand tales of political and cultural activism, now known as Unlikely Stories: Episode IV. It has spawned a print and e-book subsidiary, Unlikely Books, which has published, among other things, the 418-page anthology, Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind. Jonathan has participated in, organized, and promoted literary and arts events throughout north America, in places like New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, New Orleans, El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. His own poetry chapbooks are Last Chap (Vergin’ Books, 2004), Painting Rust and Blood and Salsa (bound together by Unlikely Books, 2006) and Prosthetic Gods (Winged City Chapbooks, 2008). He has worked as an editor and webmaster for a number of arts organizations.

Jonathan currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Unlikely Stories: Episode IV and Unlikely Books, Managing Editor for both Fulcrum and MadHat Press, and a co-ordinator for Acadiana Wordlab, a weekly literary drafting workshop in Lafayette, Louisiana. He is starting a new imprint of translation, Coeur Publishing.

Clare L. Martin’s debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, was published fall 2012 by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Selection. Her poetry has appeared in Avatar Review, Blue Fifth Review, Melusine, Poets and Artists and Louisiana Literature, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web, for Best New Poets and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Her poems have been included in the anthologies The Red Room: Writings from Press 1, Best of Farmhouse Magazine Vol. 1, Beyond Katrina, and the 2011 Press 53 Spotlight.

Clare is the Poetry Editor for MadHat Annual and the Editor of the MadHat blog, MadHat Lit. She founded and directs the Voices Seasonal Reading Series in Lafayette, Louisiana which features new and established writers, and now serves as coordinator for Acadiana Wordlab, a weekly literary drafting workshop in Lafayette. She is a lifelong resident of Louisiana, a graduate of University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a member of the Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective and a Teaching Artist through the Acadiana Center for the Arts.