river river wherever you are (4.22)

pop up river can't compare
to the poetry of three
wendy, alex, krieg--

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the spaces between Texas and Arkansas, Arkansas and Missouri, Texas and Louisiana.  She is the author of Persephone on the Metro (MadHat Press, 2014), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008), and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000). Among the anthologies that include her work are Affirming Flame: Writings By Progressive Texas Poets in the Aftermath of September 11th, The Poets Grimm, Is This Forever, Or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas, and Letters to the World. Her chapbook, After Happily Ever After, was published as #15 in the 2River Chapbook Series. Her poems have appeared on line at Fringe Magazine, Ghoti Magazine, Salt River Review, 2River View, The Arkansas Literary Forum, Unlikely Stories, StorySouth and others and in print in CiderPress Review, Cardinalis, Windhover, Borderlands, Ekphrasis and others. She has won The Bernice Blackgrove Award for Excellence, The Lipscomb Award from Centenary College, and a Passager Poetry Contest Award.

Alex Johnson, also known as “PoeticSoul,” is originally from Lafayette and has been writing since her teens. She has performed for many special events including Festival International, the Festival of Words, and 100,000 Poets for Change. Alex performs in Acadiana at venues including the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Cité des Arts, and for Patrice Melnick’s Artist Series. Recently, she founded and hosts Lyrically Inclined, a slam and open mic series.

Alex has worked with Volunteers of America and Project S.O.U.N.D. and has spoken to classrooms spanning Lafayette and St. Landry Parishes about the power of writing and self-expression. She is a strong advocate for community service and working with the youth. Through her community involvement, Alex strives to “show the youth where the volume button is. They are the voice of our future and need to be heard to make a difference.”

Dylan Krieger frets and fucks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she is currently earning her MFA in poetry and co-coordinating the Delta Mouth Literary Festival at Louisiana State University. Her heart and warm jackets, however, still reside in the Catholic stronghold of South Bend, Indiana, where she was born, baptized thrice, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 2012. As a Latin minor, she can attest she was indeed the highest there.

 

 

 

 

irregular river

double mobile to BRiver book release 
plus two of br's finest read--

Daniel Harrison Brooks is a recent graduate of LSU's english writing and culture program. He is currently the co-editor-in-chief of the delta literary journal, an annual LSU undergraduate publication, into which he pours most of his blood. His work is informed by liquor and miscommunication.

“The poems of Vernon Fowlkes, Jr. shine with presence and tender care. His eye is widely tuned and closely focused at once, inviting us into deeper, kinder living. He reminds us why we are here.” So says Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer (BOA Editions, 2013) and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, in describing Fowlkes’ most recent poetry collection, The Sound of Falling (Negative Capability Press, 2013). Of the collection, Coleman Barks says “All the unspoken words and something no one can say; something you want but cannot have. A listening begins to happen and a profound waiting…There is a lot of courage in these poems.” Fowlkes’ work has appeared over the years in numerous journals, both online and in print, including The Southern Review, The Ampersand Review, Negative Capability, Willow Springs, Elk River Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, and The Texas Observer. A 1977 graduate of the LSU Creative Writing program, he is from Mobile, AL, where he lives today.

Born in Cincinnati, Anthony Ramstetter, Jr. is currently a graduate student in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. A recipient of the Betty Jane Abrahams Memorial Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Official Runner-Up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence, Anthony’s writing is in/is forthcoming in Drupe Fruits, Five [Quarterly], HTMLGIANT, the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog and The Puritan.

  

Celia Lewis is a native of New Orleans with enduring Alabama roots. Her work most recently appeared in Literary Mobile, Tributaries, and The Xavier Review. She is publisher and co-editor of Rette’s Last Stand: The Poetry of Everette Maddox (Tensaw Press, 2004). Her collection of poems, We Still Live Here (Negative Capability Press), was published in August, 2013.Lewis founded and directed Firehouse Theatre’s Southern Voices poetry series, adapted southern short stories for the stage for South of the Salt Line Foundation, and produced and directed the JJP Readers’ Theatre Series. She holds a master’s from Spring Hill College and has lived in downtown Mobile, AL for over thirty years where she and her husband have been involved in preservation both as a passion and a livelihood.  “…Every poem tells a crisp, textured story that moves the reader out of the solace of memory–with its momentary comfort–and into ambiguity, hardship and danger, where every serious reader of poetry longs to go.”—Ralph Adamo, author of Waterblind and editor of The Xavier Review

come back river, chapbook publication

 

two river writers, debangana banerjee and vincent a. cellucci,

have a chapbook, come back river, forthcoming from finishing line press. 

for more info, please read the press release.

this chapbook is probably one of the riverest results of river writers.

please pre-order, as your river will determine the print run.

the release and shipping date is march 7th.

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.

highland reading this thursday (9.19) @ 7pm

I'll be reading at Highland Coffee's on the 19th at 7pm. This will be the second reading of the delta literary journal's Fall 2013 Highland Reading Series.  The readers include Emily Provosty, Kat de Vay, and Vincent Cellucci.

delta is a literary journal associated with LSU's English department, though they are left to fend for themselves in terms of funding, readers, etc. delta publishes a new volume of undergrad writing every year, but they're probably most recognized as the coordinators of the Highland Series.

nola adult poetry workshop

my alma mater has me teaching a poetry workshop in nola autumn!!
nola please sign up or holla to friends about courses if you know someone that may be interested in pre-funking friday nights with some word sorcery uptown (details below)



deceptions in eight weeks covering: ego, mana, incantations, evocation, animism and hexes, invisibility, "i"llusion, and ceremony.

it will be haunting--

VAC

Loyola Writing Institute

The Loyola Writing Institute is pleased to offer fall writing courses for the community!

Writing Well-Crafted Fiction
Taught by Stephen Rea • Tuesdays from 7 – 9 p.m. • Starts Sept. 17 for eight weeks
Whether your goal is to perfect your short stories or get your literary novel onto bookstore shelves, or you simply enjoy writing for yourself and want to master the basics, this course will improve your fiction writing.

The Soul of Wit: Flash Fiction Writing
Taught by Tom Andes • Wednesdays from 7 – 9 p.m. • Starts Sept. 18 for eight weeks
This class will examine the short, short stories of celebrated writers and will help students write fiction pieces under 2,000 words through workshops and tutorials.

Writing the Essay as Story: Creative Nonfiction
Taught by Peyton Burgess • Thursdays from 7 – 9 p.m. • Starts Sept. 19 for eight weeks
Students will workshop one creative essay that utilizes research and a strong personal voice in order to not only entertain the reader, but also to make the reader feel smarter.

Your Magic Words: Crafting Poetry
Taught by Vince Cellucci • Fridays from 6 – 8 p.m. • Starts Sept. 20 for eight weeks
This workshop will help students understand the language of poetic magic and the crafting of poetry. Classes will focus on reading and analysing poems, and writing and work-shopping students' poems.

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Where: Loyola campus, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday Bobet Hall, Rm 341. Thursday, Marquette Hall, Rm 406.
Cost: $250.00  
Open to: Adults (21+) and is not for Loyola credit. Participants must not be currently enrolled as full-time students.
Sign up: Send your check to Walker Percy Center, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, Box 157, New Orleans, LA 70118. Please include your email address or phone number and indicate which course you are signing up for.
For further information: e-mail lwi@loyno.edu or call 504-931-9902.

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Teacher biographies

Tom Andes was born and raised in New Hampshire, and has lived on both coasts and in New Orleans. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals and in the Best American Mystery Stories series, and he has taught writing privately and at San Francisco State University and the ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars in Natchitoches, LA.

Patricia Brady came to New Orleans in 1961 and never went away. A former director of publications at the Historic New Orleans Collection, she has published several biographies, including those of Martha Washington and Julien Hudson.

Peyton Burgess was born in Richmond, Virginia and received an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he taught undergraduate creative writing and worked as fiction editor for Washington Square Review. He is currently the fiction editor for New Orleans Review and his writing has appeared in Salon, Exquisite Corpse, The Faster Times, La Fovea, and Otis Nebula.

Vincent A. Cellucci wrote An Easy Place / To Die (City Lit, 2012). He also edited and contributed to both The Katrina Decameron (audiobook available through iTunes) and Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2013). He teaches communication in the LSU College of Art + Design.

Anne Gisleson has been published in The Mississippi Review, the New Orleans Review,Constance, Muse Media, Gambit Weekly and the Great American Poetry Show Anthology. She has participated in residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the New York Institute for Writers and has also received a Louisiana Division of the Arts grant and a Surdna Arts Teacher's Fellowship.

Stephen Rea is originally from Northern Ireland but has lived in New Orleans since 2004. A former national newspaper journalist in the UK, he is the author of the book Finn McCool's Football Club, a tale set against Hurricane Katrina centered around the Irish pub in Mid-City.