Celebrate the publication of our latest anthology, Suitcase of Chrysanthemums, at the wonderful 61 Local (upstairs space) and meet an indie press looking for new voices.
Featured readers: Austin Alexis, Pichchenda Bao, Jessica Beyer, Stephanie Dickinson, Richard Fein, melissa christine goodrum, Sergio G. Satélite, and Zev Torres.
Hosted by David Lawton.
Free admission but please buy a drink or two. The venue also has terrific food.
Suitcase of Chrysanthemums is an exhilarating collection of contemporary poetry and fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond. The anthology also contains an interview with actor/director Sonja Sohn (The Wire, The Chi, Baltimore Rising).
Submissions for our next anthology are open October 15 2018 to January 15 2019.
Austin Alexis is the author of the chapbooks Lovers and Drag Queens and For Lincoln & Other Poems, and a collection which received the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for a first full-length manuscript: Privacy Issues. His poetry and fiction appear in Barrow Street, The Journal (Ohio State University Press), Pedestal Magazine, and the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. His one-act plays have been performed at the Samuel French Short Plays Festival and at Theater for the New City.
Pichchenda Bao lives in New York City, where she has just begun to write in earnest at the intersection of coming from Cambodia as an infant refugee and becoming a feminist stay-at-home American mother.
Jessica Beyer is a writer and educator from Baltimore. Her poems have been published in Muse/A, The Adroit Journal, decomP, TIMBER, Split Rock Review, and other journals and anthologies. She has a MFA in Poetry from New York University and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Emory University. When not writing or working, Jessica can be found waterskiing, scuba diving, and giving in to wanderlust whenever possible. She most recently traveled to New Zealand, Australia, and Thailand, and is now one (Antarctica) away from getting continent bingo.
Stephanie Dickinson, an Iowa native, lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Her other books include Port Authority Orchids, Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, The Emily Fables and Flashlight Girls Run. Her work has been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the South, and 2016 New Stories from the Midwest.
Richard Fein has been published in numerous web and print journals such as Mississippi Review, Cordite, Birmingham Poetry Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Kentucky Review. A chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
melissa christine goodrum’s poetry can be found in journals and anthologies including Urgent Bards, The Torch, Transmission, Rhapsoidia, Bowery Women: Poems, Transmission, Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose (Bright Hill Press), and the chapbook a harpy flies down (Other Rooms Press). A collection of her poetry, definitions uprising, is available thanks to NYQ Books. Her literary experiences include co-editor of The Brooklyn Review, designer / publisher / editor of Cave Canem’s “Writing Down the Music” and “Letters to the Future,” co-president of the Cambridge Poetry Awards, and recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston Award from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
Born in Santo Domingo, Sergio G. Satélite moved to New York City in his mid-teens to become a Calvinist preacher, an undocumented mime, a factory worker, a Spanish interpreter and a student of analytic philosophy. For Sergio, each poem is a kind of slow, heavily salted exorcism, or something like a spiritual push-up. Examples of his work are forthcoming in LiVE MAG!, Local Knowledge, and Breadcrumbs Mag.
Zev Torres is a writer and spoken word performer whose work has appeared in publications including POSTvote (Mad Gleam Press), Nerve Lantern, Clackamas Literary Review, and I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand (great weather for MEDIA). Since 2008, Zev has hosted Make Music New York City’s annual Spoken Word Extravaganza and in 2010 founded the Skewered Syntax Poetry Crawls.