Thursday, June 28, 2012

June 29: Absinthe and Zygote

Friday, June 29th
1154 W. Lunt #302
8pm-12am

Gene Tanta
Laura Goldstein
Connor Stratman
Emily Barton

It's the first installment of Absinthe and Zygote, a rhizomatic reading series. This one features four poets, a house party, and a lot of absinthe; the next one will be entirely different.  Curated by Anne Shaw and Toby Altman.

GENE TANTA was born in Timisoara, Romania and lived there until 1984, when his family immigrated to the United States. Since then, he has lived in DeKalb, Iowa City, New York, Oaxaca City, Iasi, Milwaukee, and Chicago. He is a poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. His two poetry books are Unusual Woods (BlazeVOX 2010) and Pastoral Emergency. Tanta earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 2000 and his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009 with literary specialization in twentieth-century American poetry and the European avant-garde. His journal publications include: EPOCH, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, and Drunken Boat. Currently, he is editing two anthologies of poetry while teaching creative writing in Romania as a Fulbright Scholar.

LAURA GOLDSTEIN's poetry and essays can be found in American Letters and Commentary, MAKE, jacket2, EAOGH, Requited, Little Red Leaves, and How2. Her chapbook Let Her was released from Dancing Girl Press earlier this year, and her newest chapbook, Inventory, was just released by Sona Books at the beginning of June. She currently co-curates the Red Rover reading series with Jennifer Karmin and teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University.

CONNOR STRATMAN lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he attends graduate school at Loyola University. His work has appeared in Counterexample Poetics, Pinstripe Fedora, Scythe, Etcetera, Outsider Writers, and Otoliths. His books and chapbooks include An Early Scratch (erbacce press, 2011), Some Were Awake (plumberries press, 2011) and Volcano (Writing Knights, 2011). He also edits the online poetry blog The Balloon.

EMILY BARTON is a graduate of the University of Michigan and an MFA candidate at NYU.

To get to the reading: take the Red Line to Morse, and walk a block east and a block North.  The apartment is just on the far side of Sheridan. There's a phone you can use to call (search for Toby).