new venue new poets same river (11.3.15)

After a little rest and the search for a new home, River Writers teams up with Elevator Projects to offer poetry readings in a beautiful art space downtown--(Facebook event page)

Six Unlikely authors from south Louisiana are joining with Larissa Shmailo of New York City, Wendy Taylor Carlisle of Eureka Springs, AR, and Michael Harold of Shreveport, LA for a three-event series of literature and sound decisions in the week leading up to Grand Coteau, LA's Festival of Words! In Baton Rouge, come hear from:

Xander Bilyk
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Michael Harold
Alexandra Johnson
Dylan Krieger
and Larissa Shmailo - Poetry and Prose

Unlikely Saints is conduced with the support of Unlikely Books, Lyrically Inclined, and The Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective. 

See you in the River!

Also, see the New Orleans event and our Lafayette event!

2 exceptional readings this week

river proudly promotes two exceptional reads occurring this week:

1) collaborative poetry duos tomorrow 4.19 @ the baton rouge gallery's sundays @ 4 (pm) series (fb event)

up from New Orleans, Chris and co-auther Brett Evans read from T. Rex Parade, a book about the tit'Rex mardi gras art parade ( Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2015) 

and Christopher Shipman and Cellucci, his other co-author, will read Battleship verse from _A Ship on the Line (Unlikely Books, 2014)

2)  river writers in collaboration with ALSCW, LSU Comp. Lit & MFA Program present a reading by Noah Warren, Santiago Vizcaíno, and translator Alexis Levitin. see flier below for details and full bios below:

Alexis Levitin, SUNY Distinguished Professor, has translated over thirty books of Portuguese poetry and prose into English. His works include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm (short prose) and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (poetry), both published by New Directions. His most recent book is Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and Columbia University’s Translation Center, which awarded him the Fernando Pessoa Prize. As a translator, he has benefitted from residencies at the Banff International Translation Centre in Canada, the European Translators Collegium in Germany, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center at Bellagio, Italy. He has given readings and lectures on translation at well over one hundred colleges and universities in the USA, as well as institutions in Brazil, Portugal, Ecuador, the Czech Republic and France.     

Santiago Vizcaíno has a degree in Communications and Literature from the Catholic Pontifical University of Ecuador. He has worked as an editor at the newspaper Hoy, at Superbrands Ecuador, and at the Office of Publications in Ecuador’s Benjamín Carrión Casa de la Cultura. At present, he is the editor of the magazine Nuestro Patrimonio, published by the Ministry for the Coordination of the Patrimony, and of various other publications, including those of the Organization of Historical Centers of Latin American and the Caribbean. His work has appeared in several magazines, including Letras del Ecuador, Rocinante, Retrovisor and Casa de las Américas. His first book of poetry, Destruction in the Afternoon, won the Premio Proyectos Literarios Nacionales award from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture in 2008. His second book, In the Twilight, won second prize in the Pichincha Poetry Prize competition in 2010. His work has appeared in Bitter Oleander, Chattahoochee Review, Connotation Press, Dirty Goat, Eleven/Eleven, eXchanges, Ezra, Lake Effect, Moon City Review, Osiris, Per Contra, Rowboat, Saranac Review, and Words Without Borders. The translations of all forty poems that comprise the text of Destruction in the Afternoon have been published in literary magazines in the United States. He was awarded a one-year fellowship to Malaga, Spain, in 2011. 

Noah Warren was born in Nova Scotia in 1989 and grew up in New England. He received his BA from Yale, which awarded him the valuable Fredrick M. Clapp Fellowship for 2011-12 on the strength of his poetry. After a stint teaching English at Phillips Academy Andover he moved to New Orleans in 2013. His first book, The Destroyer in the Glass, was chosen by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2015, and will be published by Yale University Press in April 2016. He is the recent recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and will begin his tenure at Stanford in the fall. His poems appear in Poetry, The Southern Review, AGNI, Yale Review, and The Missouri Review, among other journals. 

 

new review

new review of recent book, A Ship on the Line, in The Pedestal Magazine, the lit mag where I published my first poem. thanks to Cindy Sostchen-Hochman for following us to the "river’s aphotic zone."

deltamouth_this week

deltamouth is one of my fav festivals in la
singing free literary rhythm & blues

i'm introducing brock guthrie this evening.
#comesee. 
  
fb events and details:

thursday_KICKOFF
friday_QUEER NIGHT
& sat_performance finale


thurs readers:
  

BROOKE CHAMPAGNE, a descendant of P. G. T. Beauregard, was born and raised in New Orleans. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Louisiana State University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Louisiana Literature, Burnside Review, Housefire, DIG, Prick of the Spindle, and most recently, in the anthology Tuscaloosa Writes This. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with her husband, the poet Brock Guthrie, and their creative dogs King and Nola.

BROCK GUTHRIE is the author of Contemplative Man, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2014. He grew up in Athens, Ohio, and got his B.A. and MA in English from Ohio University and his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. His poems have appeared inCimarron Review, Iron Horse, Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

ANGUS WOODWARD is a Louisiana writer of prose whose comic novel, Americanisation: Lessons in American Culture and Language, was published by Livingston Press in 2011. Oxford American hailed Americanisation as “a hilariously crafted postmodern novel wedged into the template of a social-studies textbook for immigrants.” His follow-up to Americanisation is Oily, a comical, unconventional novel about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

BERND SAUERMANN graduated from McNeese State University with an MA in English and an MFA in Poetry. He currently teaches composition, literature, creative writing, and film in the Division of Fine Arts and Humanities at Hopkinsville Community College in Kentucky. Sauermann was also the poetry editor at Whole Beast Rag. He’s had poems, stories and photographs published in McSweeney’s, Southern Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore, The Kansas Quarterly Review of Literature, and many other publications. He has a chapbook entitled Diesel Generator out from Horse Less Press (2013), and his first full-length collection, Seven Notes of a Dead Man’s Song, was recently released by MadHat Press.

EARL LOVELACE (born July 13, 1935, Toco, Trinidad) is a West Indian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright celebrated for his descriptive, dramatic fiction about West Indian culture. Using Trinidadian speech patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures. His novels include While Gods Are Falling (1965), The Schoolmaster (1968), The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), The Wine of Astonishment (1982), and Salt (1996). Lovelace also published the short-story collection A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (1988), as well as the plays The New Hardware Store and My Name Is Village, both collected in Jestina’s Calypso & Other Plays (1984).

fri:

MEL COYLE is from Chicago and other places where the corn grows. Currently, she lives in New Orleans where she co-edits TENDE RLOIN, an online poetry gallery and hosts ColdCuts, the reading series. You can find some of her work online.

JENN MARIE NUNES is the author of five chapbooks, including HYMN: An Ovulution, a collaboration with poet Mel Coyle, forthcoming from Bloof Books. She lives in New Orleans where she co-edits TENDE RLOIN, an online gallery for poetry, and performs as [Bi]Nary with the New Orleans Poetry Brothel. Her first full-length collection, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin as the winner of the Queer Voices Award, is forthcoming from Switchback Books.

MEGAN VOLPERT is the author of five books on communication and popular culture, most notably about Andy Warhol and most currently, Only Ride (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) is a nominee for Georgia Author of the Year. She has been teaching high school English in Atlanta for the better part of a decade and recently served as her school's Teacher of the Year. Volpert edited the American Library Association-honored and Lambda finalist anthology This assignment is so gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching. She got her MFA at LSU. Predictably, www.meganvolpert.com is her website.

BRAD RICHARD is the author of three books of poems and two chapbooks, including Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Curtain Optional (Press Street, 2011), and Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). His poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Literary Imagination, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Okey-Panky, Passages North, Plume, Witness, and Xavier Review, among other journals. He directs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans, and keeps very busy with endeavors for young writers and LGBT writers in the New Orleans region.

sat: 

MAURICE RUFFIN is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. He has recently won two short story awards: the 2014 Iowa Review fiction award (for “The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You”) and the 2014 Short Fiction Contest at So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art! (for “The Anchor Song”). His novel-in-progress, All of the Lights, won the gold medal for that category in the 2014 William Faulkner-William Wisdom writing competition, and an excerpt will appear in an upcoming issue of Callaloo. His writing has also appeared in The Knicknackery, Writing Tomorrow, Redivider Journal, 94 Creations, The Apalachee Review, Regarding Arts & Letters, and the University of New Orleans’s Ellipsis.

MONA LISA SALOY is an author, folklorist, educator, and scholar. An award-winning author of contemporary Creole culture in poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina, Saloy documents sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games to discuss the importance of play. Her first book of poems, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and tied for a third. Her new book, Second Line Home, is a refreshing collection of poems that captures the day-to-day New Orleans speech, contemplates family dynamics, and celebrates New Orleans—all in a way everyday people can enjoy.

CORINA COPP is a writer and theater artist based in New York. She is the author of the chapbooks ALL STOCK MUST GO (Shit Valley Verlag, Cambridge, UK), Miracle Mare (Trafficker Press), and Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse), among others. Recent work can be found in Cabinet, BOMB, Boston Review, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism (Triple Canopy), SFMOMA’s Open Space, and elsewhere. She is developing a three-part play entitled The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love, inspired by the successive forms of the work of Marguerite Duras. She is a curator at the Segue Foundation and a 2014 NYFA Fellow in Poetry. Her first book, The Green Ray, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse this spring.

DESIREE DALLAGIACOMO is a student at the University of New Orleans where she studies creative writing and women & gender. In October of 2014, She ranked 3rd at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, the recipient of UNO’s Ryan Chigazola Poetry Scholarship, and, as a member of Slam New Orleans, ranked 3rd in the nation at the 2014 National Poetry Slam. She is a teaching artist for Forward Arts, The Recovery School District, and The Centre for the Arts. Her work has been featured on EverydayFeminism.com, The Huffington Post, Upworthy.com, in Tulane University’s production of The Vagina Monologues, the New Orleans Fringe Festival, Tandem Review, and Words Dance Literary Magazine. For more of her work, you can check out poemsbydes.tumblr.com

BUDDY WAKEFIELD is a three-time world champion spoken word artist featured on the BBC, ABC Radio National, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR, and most recently signed to Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. In 2004 he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Finals and then successfully defended that title at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands against the national champions of seven European countries. In 2005 he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship again and has gone on to share the stage with nearly every notable performance poet in the world. Born in Shreveport, LA, mostly raised in Baytown, TX, and now claiming Seattle, WA as home, Buddy is an author at Write Bloody Publishing, a queer activist, and an original Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle. Wakefield, who is not concerned with what poetry is or is not, delivers raw, rounded, disarming performances of humor and heart.



  

t(w)o river: feb3

feb3 @ 8pm
international poet marc vincenz returns
and two exciting first rivers from
ull professor, rhonda r. berkely, and br's own anna wilson--

Rhonda R. Berkeley is a dream-poet, whose work explores unconscious processes and motivations, through a multiplicity of associations. Dr. Berkeley's academic focus on psychoanalytic theory and poetics informs her work. She teaches English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Berkeley's poetry has been published in various media, including journals like Ekleksographia, Knock 27, Rue de Fleures, and Moondance; a collaborative chapbook, Other Sticky Valentines; and a film, Acadie. Her poem, fire and water, received a Pushcart Prize nomination. Berkeley's chapbook, Ragbag,  was published by Nous-zot Press in 2011. Berkeley is also a semi-professional photographer.

Marc Vincenz has published eight collections of poetry; his latest are This Wasted Land and its Chymical Illuminations (Lavender Ink) and Becoming the Sound of Bees. forthcoming with Ampersand Books.  He has been published extensively in many journals and anthologies, including: The Manhattan Review, Washington Square Review, Plume, Guernica, The Bitter Oleander, St. Petersburg Review, Fourteen Hills, Exquisite Corpse, Spillway and The Canary. He is the translator of numerous German-language poets, including the Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz.  His own work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French and Chinese. He is Coeditor of Fulcrum and Executive Editor of MadHat Press and lives in Cambridge, MA. 

Anna Wilson relocated from the Third Coast to the Gulf Coast to undertake an M.F.A. at Louisiana State University, where she also teaches writing and makes "textually active" visual art, from small books and videos to large installations featuring handmade paper. Anna's poetry, reviews, and interviews have been featured and are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Meatpaper, The Volta Blog, New Delta Review, and other places.

krewe de vieux eve nola reading

krewe de vieux eve 
nola reading 
facebook event

new year / new river

can't not pop up for the new year!!
2015 new rivers from:
fb event page

Xui Avila was born in Mexico and raised in Houston, Texas where he earned his B.A. in English from UH-D. In Houston, he worked for several outreach programs including Writers in the Schools, Voices Breaking Boundaries, and Talento Bilingue de Houston.  He was accepted into LSU’s Creative Writing Program in 2010 and earned his MFA in the Spring of 2013.  Much of his poetry consists of complicating and compounding the human anatomy, the desert terrain, with religious rite and iconography.  He is currently piecing together a chapbook version of his larger work des-milagros. 

Claire Dixon was born in England and grew up in Canada, an experience that tempered her general moodiness with excessive politeness and also gave her minor nerve damage in the form of three lightly frostbitten toes. When it's cold, her toes feel like they are floating loose in her socks like Lincoln logs. She has an MFA from LSU and recently won first place for poetry in the Words and Music/Faulkner Wisdom Writing Competition. She has embraced the cliche of being a writer with a library science degree and works in records management. In her spare time, she can be found overinstagramming trees, food and her two year old daughter.

Charles Garrett, has published no books; has no published collections for you to buy or pretend to care about. He has no stake in making you like him or his words, but you will undoubtedly love his voice. He does not do radio, nor does he sing. He loves cooking for his son, and learning the extremes of his own tolerance. He is not a "teaching artist" nor a professional one, but will gladly talk and share with anyone, willing to listen. He doesn't remember the names of most individuals he meets, so repeat your name to him if you care to be remembered. He believes poetry is in the way we bleed, not how much we do so. His poetry is meant to be read at the most inopportune times: in churches, gynecologist waiting rooms, unemployment lines, welfare lines, admissions and financial aid offices, as well as funerals. He knows that you will most likely remain lost after reading/hearing his work. This is by design. He is not here to walk the path for you, merely to light your way, as he tries to find his. Hold your glasses firmly and know that you are in the best place for poetry.

Muriel Leung is a multimedia poet and former teaching artist from Queens, NY. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Coconut, Ghost Proposal, TENDE RLOIN, Nepantla, Bone Bouquet, and others. She is a recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and is a regular contributor to The Blood-Jet Writing Hour poetry podcast. Currently, she is a MFA candidate in poetry at Louisiana State University where she also serves as the Assistant Editor of New Delta Review.