The reading will be streamed live to our facebook page and you may also register to watch directly on Zoom. Event registration for Zoom viewing is available through Eventbrite.
“I wrote the poems in ‘Tricks of Light’ in the year leading up to 2020. I was visiting my elderly mother in central Pennsylvania fairly often, and those trips reminded me of my childhood. I was thinking not only of the rural setting, but also of my immediate family, both past and present. As well, the poems came from my life in the city, at a time when I was teaching in person in Brooklyn and was riding my bicycle to get from Manhattan to class. The state of alertness when riding brought many observations into focus. Through all of this—my rural childhood and my urban life—I passed through various states of mind: fear, anger, curiosity, even amusement. These brief vignettes also have a spiritual side. My mother grew up in China, where she was surrounded by Buddhist monks. She is officially Christian (her father was a minister), but I believe she has more of a Buddhist / Confucian outlook on life. That view has—if I’ve been lucky—rubbed off on me. I hope you enjoy the poems!”
About the Readers
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of seven books, including Tricks of Light (great weather for MEDIA, 2020). His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Members’ Choice Award, and his creative memoir Guess and Check received the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, as well as in Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Faultline, Fiction, Fiction International, Pleaides, Potomac Review, Sou’wester, and many other magazines. A graduate of Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University, Rutkowski received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and was a resident writer at Yaddo, MacDowell, and other colonies. Traveling extensively, he has been a featured reader in Budapest, Dublin, London, Paris, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and was selected to read in the former compound of East German President Erich Honecker in Berlin. Rutkowski teaches at Medgar Evers College and the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA and lives with his wife, Randi Hoffman, in Manhattan.
John S. Hall is a poet/spoken word artist, author, and singer-songwriter. He has released numerous albums of varying quality and popularity, including nine albums with various incarnations of his band King Missile. John has performed in three continents, 45 states, and four boroughs, and has been seen on HBO, PBS, and MTV.
Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual writer of Japanese origin. She writes poetry, haiku, art criticism, and essays. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (Ugly Duckling Presse), and most recently Anonymous Landscape (Lithic Press).
Deborah Pintonelli is the author of Meat and Memory (poetry) and Ego Monkey (stories), and several novels. She has won awards from the Illinois Arts Council, PEN Midwest, the National Association of Arts and Letters, and is a 2018 recipient of an Acker Award.
Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in the snoozy hamlet of Phoenicia, New York. He has published 10 books, the most recent being Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies (Monkfish). Sparrow plays tonette in the axiomatic pop group Foamola. Facebook: Sparrow X. Carter, Twitter: @sparrow14, Instagram: sparrowx.carter