W4tB presents Open Mic at the Bus Stop:

7:30pm - 10:00pm

Cafe Ballou

939 N Western Ave.

W4tB Open Mic Night

Cafe Ballou

939 N Western

7:30-10pm

Featuring: Elizabeth Harper

Evan Lavender Smith & Kiki Petrosino @ Columbia College

Spring 2011 PO ET RY Reading Series
Sponsored by the Department of English Columbia College Chicago

Kiki Petrosino & Evan Lavender-Smith
Stage Two 618 S. Michigan, Second Floor Wednesday, April 13, 5:30p.m.


KIKI PETROSINO is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009). She was born in Baltimore and received her BA from the University of Virginia. She spent two years in Switzerland teaching English and Italian at a private school, after which she earned graduate degrees from both the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her awards include a post-graduate writing fellowship from the University of Iowa and two staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Louisville.

EVAN LAVENDER-SMITH is the author of Avatar (2011) and From Old Notebooks (2010). Stephen Burt has called From Old Notebooks "an anti-masterpiece of an anti-novel." Charles Altieri said the book represents “conceptual art that is thoroughly literary." Lavender-Smith is the editor of Noemi Press, the prose and drama editor of Puerto del Sol and a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University. He lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico with his wife and children. This event is free and open to the public.

April 15 & 16: Roy Fisher Symposium

Friday, April 15 @ 7pm
Readings by August Kleinzahler, Maureen McLane, & Tom Pickard
at The (New) Corpse Space
1511 N. Milwaukee Ave

Saturday, April 16 @ 1:30pm
Roy Fisher Symposium - Talks & a Film
at Morningstar
22 W. Washington, 7th Floor

Chicago Poetry Project is pleased to announce a short symposium on the work of British poet Roy Fisher. The event will feature short talks by August Kleinzahler, Maureen McLane, and Tom Pickard and will include a screening of Pickard's film about Fisher, "Birmingham Is What I Think With." The Friday evening prior to the symposium, the presenters will give a group reading of their own and Fisher's poetry.

Born in 1930, Roy Fisher is a British poet of remarkable range. Stripped of ornament, skeptical in temperament, his poems find music in sharp angles, hesitations, and silences. They often move through post-industrial landscapes of Birmingham and the English Midlands, registering crepuscular half-tones, "the dog odour / of water," and "malted-milk brickwork." Beyond such literal subjects, Fisher captures the intermingling of fancy and perception, the play of light and shadow in the mind itself. As August Kleinzahler has suggested, "The eye darts about in Fisher's poetry. It abhors the object at rest, framing of any kind. It's like a camera, jerking and swiveling on an unstable tripod. Early and late, the poetry is about the eye in motion. The shifts may be subtle or vertiginously abrupt. It's best not to get too comfortable as you progress through a poem because you're not going to be where you think you are for long." His restless and exploratory poetry has long been admired in the United Kingdom, and by a select few readers in the United States. His Selected Poems, edited by Kleinzahler and designed to introduce his work to an American audience, has just been published by Flood Editions.

The symposium is free and open to the public but *REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR THIS EVENT*. Simply send an e-mail to john.tipton64@gmail.com with your first and last name so we can put you on the access list, and bring photo ID to the event. This is a building security requirement.

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949, and raised in Fort Lee, New Jersey. For six years, he commuted everyday, from New Jersey to New York, to attend the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin as an East Asian Studies major. He dropped out of Wisconsin, and finished his studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia where he majored in English and studied with Basil Bunting, whom he considered a great hero. Kleinzahler is the author of ten books of poetry, including: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize; Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club : Poems: 1975-1990 (2000); Green Sees Things in Waves (1999); and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (1995). He is also the author of one prose book, the meditative memoir Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). His honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Acheson-Reader’s Digest Award for Poetry, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the post of poet laureate in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Maureen N. McLane was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, from which she received her PhD in 1997. She is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (CUP, 2000, 2006). She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008). Her research and teaching focus on British literature and culture, 1750-30, and more broadly on the intersection of poetry, "literature," and modernity: special areas of interest include romanticism, modernism, balladry (British and American), mediality, 20th- and 21st-century poetries in English, the human sciences, historiography, and the case of Scotland. A poet and critic, she is the author of Same Life: poems (FSG, 2008) and World Enough: poems (FSG, forthcoming June 2010). A contributing editor at Boston Review, her articles on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality have appeared widely, in (e.g.) The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Review, The Washington Post, American Poet, and on the Poetry Foundation website. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle's Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing; she served on the Board of Directors of the NBCC, 2007-2010. Before coming to NYU, she taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project. She thinks print is not dead, nor poetry, nor the human--though regarding what the latter two might be, she remains agnostic.

Tom Pickard’s first book of poems, High on The Walls, was published in 1968 by Fulcrum Press and his latest, Ballad of Jamie Allan, by Flood Editions in 2008. It was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle awards. In 1970 City Lights published Guttersnipe and in 2011 Pressed Wafer published More Pricks Than Prizes, both part memoirs. He also documented northern working-class culture/history in books, on radio and in TV documentaries. He has worked with musicians, including John Harle for whom her wrote the libretto, Ballad of Jamie Allan, and more recently the words for Harle’s City Solstice—a piece for saxophone and the Kings College Cambridge Choir. Currently collaborating with the singer songwriter, Ben Murray, on his interpretation of Ballad of Jamie Allan with song, field recordings, and poems from the book. Pickard has been banned from the North Sea, the Newcastle Festival, and HM Prisons, amongst other places. He now lives in the North Pennine Hills near the Border with Scotland and makes recordings of winds on Fiends Fell while walking and watching cloud shadows on distant hills.

Chicago Poetry Project
http://chicagopoetryproject.wordpress.com

Dirty South Dance Party & Reading

Artifice Magazine and Beauty Bar present
the inaugural Dirty South Dance Party
with beats provided by Lindsay "DJ Sensible Shoes" Hunter
and free pizza provided by Beauty Bar

Wednesday, April 13th
7-10pm

at Beauty Bar
1444 W. Chicago Avenue

7pm - Come get your dance on
8:30pm - Readings
9pm - Dance on, and on, and on

$5 donation at the door, proceeds benefit Artifice Magazine

April 10: In Memory of Kathryn Hixson

NO JOKE:
Readings in Memory of Kathryn Hixson

SUNDAY, APRIL 10
1–4pm

Readers will include:
Lauren Carter
Michael Fleming
REH Gordon
Joe Grimm
Jennifer Karmin
Michael Milano
Marissa Perel

at LVL3
1542 N. Milwaukee Ave. 3rd fl
near the CTA Damen blue line
http://lvl3gallery.com

This reading is in in conjunction with the exhibition No Joke, dedicated to Kathryn Hixson who passed away in the Fall of 2010. Participants will read from Kathryn's writing and their creative responses to her work.

Kathryn Hixson was one of the most distinguished art critics in Chicago, an amazing teacher, advisor and good friend. She was finishing a PhD dissertation at the University of Texas Austin on the role of humor in the work of Bruce Nauman and Richard Prince.

In the spirit of her spontaneity, criticality and wise-ass attitude, recent M.F.A graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago pay tribute to Kathryn and her influence on the latest generation of emerging artists. No Joke features new work by: Andy Cahill, Alan & Michael Fleming, Yasi Ghanbari, Danny Greene, Joe Grimm, Marissa Perel, Aaron David Ross, and Michael Vallera. The show runs from April 2 – April 30, 2011.

Closing Reception
Saturday, April 30
5–8pm

LVL3 is an exhibition space directed by Vincent Uribe. It is dedicated in supporting collaborative work and group shows to foster connections between emerging and established artists.

Revolving Door Series

Join us Wednesday, 27 April 

for Poetry Outside the Lines!

This month's features:

Sunny Byers is Irish. Oldest. Lover of Chicago. Hoofer. She says what shouldn't be said and not always done in the right way. She's not afraid to make an ass of ... anything. Her work has been published.

Jacob Saenz is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago where he served as an editor for the Columbia Poetry Review. His work has appeared in Inkstains, Buffalo Carp, Paramanu Pentaquark and Poetry. He has been nominated for an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. He works at a library.

Where: South Halsted Gallery (1825 S. Halsted)

When: Open mic @ 7PM, Features @ 7:30PM

April 8: A Tribute to Akilah Oliver

A Tribute to Akilah Oliver

FRIDAY, APRIL 8th
8-10pm

A Toast in Your House:
a memorial reading to celebrate
the life & work of Akilah Oliver

Featuring:
Adrienne Dodt
Krista Franklin
Jenny Henry
Jennifer Karmin + dancer J’Sun Howard
John Keene
Kevin Kilroy
Marie Larson
Todd McCarty
Marissa Perel

Hosted by Rebecca George
& Luis Humberto Valadez

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave

logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

$4 suggested donation
All funds will be donated to assist the Oliver family with the costs
associated with Akliah’s departure and to keep her work alive!

Co-presented by the Midwest Naropa Writers & Red Rover Series
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

AKILAH OLIVER was a poet, a dedicated teacher, and an inspiration to the lives she touched. Her books include An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish, 2004), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and A Toast In The House of Friends (Coffee House, 2009). She taught poetry in New York at The New School, Pratt Institute and The Poetry Project. She also taught at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, http://www.akilaholiver.com.

We will remember her warmly, in a house of friends, with our words.