SOMMER BROWNING, NOAH ELI GORDON, CHRISTINE NEACOLE KANOWNIK, JOSEPH KAPLAN, PAUL LEGAULT

Saturday, April 12th, 6pm, Irving Amphitheater (4402 Oak St. KCMO 64111) FREE!

Sommer BROWNING is the mother of Georgia, the roommate of Noah, the author of Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC; 2011), and a librarian. She lives in Denver. Her website is asthmachronicles.com.

Noah Eli GORDON lives in Denver, CO. He teaches graduate courses in poetry, poetics, publishing, and nonfiction for the University of Colorado–Boulder’s MFA program, where he also directs Subito Press. His recent books include The Year or the Rooster from Ahsahta Press and The Source from Futurepeom, as well as Novel Pictorial Noise, which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award.

Christine Neacole KANOWNIK’s We are Now Beginning to Act Wildly was published by Diez Press in 2012. You can find her work in such places as: The Huffington Post, EOAGH, H_NGM_N and The Poetry Project Newsletter. She lives in Brooklyn.

Joseph KAPLAN grew up in Brooklyn and now works as a freelance designer in St. Louis. He was formerly creative director at the L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine. He holds a BFA in Graphic Design from RISD. His work has appeared in publications including Virginia Quarterly Review and The Third Rail. He spends most of his time hanging out with his partner Paul (Legault, who is here right now) and their dog, Laura. He and Paul are currently working on a translation of The Country Where Everything is Permitted by Sophie Podolski.

Paul LEGAULT s the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney's, 2012). He's a Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Paul and his partner Joseph Kaplan are currently collaborating on a translation of Sophie Podolski's The Country Where Everything is Permitted.

AMIE BARRODALE, RAUAN KLASSNIK & JENNIFER L. KNOX

Saturday, March 8th, 7pm, Irving Amphitheater (4402 Oak St. KCMO 64111) FREE!

Amie BARRODALE is the fiction editor of Vice magazine. She received the Paris Review's Plimpton Discovery Prize in 2012 for her short story "William Wei." She is a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She was raised a Buddhist and her mother ran the local chapter of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's sangha in Houston, Texas. She grew up in Texas and went to Barnard for college. She worked as a senior editor at The Onion and Vice, then spent a year in India. She currently lives in Kansas City, with her husband.

Rauan KLASSNIK's Sky Rat releases end of February, 2014. He is also the author of two Black Ocean books: Holy Land (2008) and The Moon's Jaw (2013). Rauan lives in a suburb of Seattle with his wife Edith.

Jennifer L. KNOX's new book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is available from Bloof Books. Her other books, Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me, are also available through Bloof. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series (1997, 2003, 2006, and 2011) as well as the anthologies Great American Prose Poems, From Poet to Present and Best American Erotic Poems.

She is currently at work on her first novel.

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD, BRIDGET LOWE & CLANCY MARTIN

Saturday, December 7th, 6:30pm at Walnut Laundromat
(4241 Walnut St. KCMO 64111) FREE!

Patricia LOCKWOOD’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Tin House, and Poetry. She is the author of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012).

Bridget LOWE is the author of At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) and lives in Kansas City, where she was born.

Clancy MARTIN is the author of the novels How to Sell and Travels in Central America, as well as the forthcoming nonfiction book Love, Lies and Marriage (FSG, 2014) and numerous books in philosophy. His writing has appeared in Harper's (where he is a contributing editor), The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, McSweeney's, BookForum, The Wall Street Journal, and many other places. He frequently speaks on NPR and the Huffington Post. A Guggenheim Fellow (2011-2012), his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has three daughters, Margaret, Portia and Zelly. He is a professor of philosophy at UMKC, and lives in Kansas City with his wife the writer Amie Barrodale.

TJ JARRETT, SCOTT GARSON, & GINA MYERS

7pm, Saturday, November 16th at Irving Amphitheater 
(4402 Oak St., KCMO 64111) FREE!


TJ JARRETT is a writer and software developer in Nashville, Tennessee. Her recent work has been published or is forthcoming in African American Review, Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boxcar Poetry Review, Callaloo, DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Linebreak, Rattle, Southern Poetry Anthology, Third Coast, West Branch and others. Her debut collection Ain’t No Grave was published with New Issues Press in the fall of 2013. Her second collection Zion (winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition 2013) will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in the fall of 2014.

Scott GARSON is the author of IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE?--a collection of stories--and AMERICAN GYMNOPEDIES, a book of microfictions. His fiction has won awards from Playboy, The Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and Dzanc Books, and he has work in or coming from Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant and others. He edits the Pushcart-Prize-winning journal of very short fiction, Wigleaf.

Gina MYERS is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013) and A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009), as well as numerous chapbooks. Originally from Saginaw, MI, she now lives in Atlanta, GA where she helps run the "What's New in Poetry?" series at Emory University.

ANTHONY HURLBURT, MEGAN KAMINSKI & LESLEY WHEELER

Saturday, October 5th, 7pm at Rag & Bone.
(1412 W. 12th St. KCMO 64101) FREE!

Anthony HURLBURT is a drag queen, interdisciplinary/performance artist, and writer currently living in Kansas City.  His work is a cross breed between a romance novel—with a main character that has multiple personalities and 80's sci-fi/horror.  Gender identity, family constructs, and a skewed autobiographical narrative also play a big role in his work.  His other interests include men, crocheting, cooking, eating, the art of drag, and movies.  He is currently working on an extensive narrative between himself, and two personas that he has created; his ex-wife Dahlia Antoinette and their daughter ANTHALIA.

Megan KAMINSKI is the author of Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012) and six chapbooks of poetry, most recently This Place (Dusie, 2013) and Gemology (Little Red Leaves Textile Series, 2012). She lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas and curates the Taproom Poetry Series. For more information, visit her at http://www.megankaminski.com/

Lesley WHEELER is a writer and teacher living in KCMO. Originally from Massachusetts, she is an editor of Strange Cage and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

MARY MARGARET ALVARADO, NICO ALVARADO & AMELIA MCKNIGHT

Saturday, September 21st, 7pm at Walnut Laundromat
(4241 Walnut St. KCMO 64111) FREE!

Mia ALVARADO is the author of Hey Folly (Dos Madres Press). She has work forthcoming in the Boston Review, and other recent stuff in The Point, Thermos and Jacket 2. She's working on a collection of lyric essays called Goodnight Goodnight Goodnight Good Morning and a post-apocalyptic novel set in Colorado, where she lives. She's a gardener, teacher, and ma, in the opposite order.

Nico ALVARADO was born in Basque country in 1971 and educated in Scotland, Switzerland, and Ohio. After achieving some renown as a telemark skier in the late 1980s, he spent many years writing Argentine soap operas. The author of many unpublished works of poetry and detective fiction, he lives in Montana and raises bighorn sheep.

Amelia MCKNIGHT has lived in and around Kansas City her entire life. She is currently a senior in painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. She collects books about animals and likes to go to the zoo.

(this reading is in partnership with Byproduct: The Laundromat)

http://rocketgrants.org/category/2012-projects/byproduct-the-laundromat/

KATE GREENSTREET

7pm, Saturday, April 13th at Irving Amphitheater (4402 Oak St., KCMO 64111) FREE!

Kate GREENSTREET is currently on the road with her new book Young Tambling. Her previous books are case sensitive and The Last 4 Things, all from Ahsahta Press. Her poetry can be found in Colorado Review, Boston Review, Guernica, Fence, Chicago Review, and other journals. For more information, visit her website.