A Common Sense Reading Series

HEATHER CHRISTLE, MATT HART & BEN HERSEY

2012-02-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, March 7th, 7:00pm

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

FREE! (But donations to help with the poets' gas and jerky are warmly accepted)

HEATHER CHRISTLE is the author of What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), and The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in publications including The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and The New Yorker. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Western Massachusetts.

MATT HART is the author of several books of poems, including Wolf Face, Light-Headed, and most recently Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati and plays in the band Travel.

BENJAMIN HERSEY is a writer and performance artist living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He recently collaborated with monologuist Seth Lepore in Get a Job/Take Me Home Tonight and Dance and Text: A Lethal Combination. In 2010, he appeared as Christopher Smart in Madeline ffitch's adaptation of Jubilate Agno. A novel excerpt, stories and a performance text have appeared in Everyday Genius, Fact-Simile and Requited. This is What We're Up Against, a chapbook of monologues, was published by Chuckwagon in 2008.

JOE AGUILAR & TEAL WILSON

2012-01-21T05:24:00.000-08:00

Sunday, February 12th, 4:00pm

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

FREE! (But donations to help with the poets' gas and jerky are warmly accepted)

JOE AGUILAR is a George Washington Carver fellow in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Missouri. His work is in Quarterly West, LIT, Puerto del Sol, HTMLGIANT and elsewhere.

TEAL WILSON was born in the Southwest, moved to the Midwest, returned to the Southwest, called back to the Midwest. She is an amateur printmaker at the Kansas City Art Institute. Virgo. Year of the Horse. Rage rocket. She is always dreaming of the perfect sandwich.

BIRDS, LLC TOUR: JUSTIN MARKS, EMILY PETTIT, SAMPSON STARKWEATHER, PAIGE TAGGART, CHRIS TONELLI

2011-11-19T19:18:00.000-08:00

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9TH, 2011, 7PM

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

FREE! (But donations to help with the poets' gas and jerky are warmly accepted)

JUSTIN MARKS’s first full length book is A Million in Prizes (New Issues, 2009). He is also the author of several chapbooks, the most recent being On Happier Lawns (Poor Claudia, 2011). A founding editor of Birds, LLC, he lives in Queens, NY with his wife and their twin son and daughter.

EMILY PETTIT is the author of two chapbooks How (Octopus Books) and What Happened to Limbo (Pilot Books). GOAT IN THE SNOW (Birds LLC) is her first full-length book. She is an editor for notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press and jubilat. She teaches poetry at Flying Object.

SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is the author of Self Help Poems, The Heart is Green from So Much Waiting, City of Moths and The Photograph. He played professional soccer in New Zealand and was an editor of physics and chemistry books, currently he is the Publications Coordinator at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, you can read recent work here. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and he be a Bird.

PAIGE TAGGART was born and lived in Northern California for 25 years, she's been living in Brooklyn the past 5 years. Her chapbook DIGITAL MACRAMÉ was released by Poor Claudia (Feb 2011), and Polaroid Parade from Greying Ghost Press (July 2011). The Ice Poems are forthcoming with DoubleCross Press. She was a 2009 recipient of the New York Foundation of the Art's grant. Be on the lookout for her poems forthcoming in Jubilat, Sentence, No Dear and Spinning Jenny. Check out her jewelry wares: mactaggartjewelry.blogspot.com

CHRIS TONELLI is one of the founding editors of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He also founded and curates the So and So Series and edits the So and So Magazine. He is the author of four chapbooks, most recently No Theater (Brave Men Press) and For People Who Like Gravity and Other People (Rope-A-Dope Press), and his first full-length collection is The Trees Around. New work can be found in the upcoming issues of The Laurel Review and Fou. He teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Allison and their son Miles.

BLOOF BOOKS TOUR: SHANNA COMPTON, PETER DAVIS & SANDRA SIMONDS

2011-10-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13th, 4:00pm

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

FREE! (But donations to help with the poets' gas and jerky are warmly accepted)

SHANNA COMPTON’s books include Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005), For Girls & Others (Bloof, 2008), and Gamers (Soft Skull, 2004), and the chapbooks Rare Vagrants (Dusie, 2010), Scurrilous Toy (Dusie, 2007), and others. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse, McSweeney’s, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, the Poetry Foundation’s website, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a new poetry collection called The Blank Verge, forthcoming from Bloof Books in Spring 2012. She lives on the internet at shannacompton.com.

PETER DAVIS writes, draws, and makes music in Muncie, Indiana, with his sweet kids and sweet wife. His first book of poetry is Hitler’s Mustache (2007), and he edited Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art (2005) and coedited Poet’s Bookshelf II (2008) with Tom Koontz, all from Barnwood Press. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry series and recent work may be found in Lamination Colony, Everyday Genius, Jacket, No Tell Motel, and elsewhere. He teaches English at Ball State University. More, including his music project, Short Hand, at artisnecessary.com. His third poetry collection, Tina, is forthcoming from Bloof Books.

SANDRA SIMONDS grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her second full-length collection of poems, Mother was a Tragic Girl, will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2012. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series; she is also the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Her poems have been published in many journals such as Poetry, The Believer, the Colorado Review, Fence, the Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Assistant Professor of English at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia.

NICK DEMSKE, ADAM FELL & MATTHEW GUENETTE

2011-10-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27th, 7:00pm

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

FREE! (But donations to help with the poets' gas and jerky are warmly accepted)

NICK DEMSKE'S self-titled manuscript was selected by Joyelle McSweeney for the 2010 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize. He is currently wrapping up a 40-some date book tour which traversed across all of America. He normally lives in Racine Wisconsin, but you can visit him at nickipoo.wordpress.com.

Adam Fell is the author of I AM NOT A PIONEER, published by H_NGM_N Books, and the chapbook Ten Keys to Being a Champion On and Off the Field (H_NGM_N, 2010). He is a graduate of UW-Madison & the Iowa Writers’ Workshop & teaches at Edgewood College in Madison, WI, where he co-curates the Monsters of Poetry reading series.

Matthew Guenette is the author of two full-length collections: American Busboy (Editor’s Choice, University of Akron Press, 2011) and Sudden Anthem(Winner, American Poetry Journal Prize, Dream Horse Press, 2008). He has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center (2012) and the Hessen-Wisconsin Literary Exchange (2009). Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his poems have been published in a number of national journals and anthologies, including Barn Owl Review, Diagram, Greensboro Review, Forklift: Ohio, Spoon River Poetry Review, Quarterly West, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (Eds. Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz, University of Akron Press, 2012). He lives, works and loses sleep in Madison, WI.

SPRUNG FORMAL READING/RELEASE PARTY

2011-04-28T05:22:00.000-07:00

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

Wednesday, May 11th, 8pm-10pm

FREE!

We welcome you to come out and celebrate the release of KCAI's 2011 Sprung Formal annual literary arts journal at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary on May 11th at 8pm! There will be free food, beverage, and tantalizing words.

Don't miss it!

In case you were wondering, this year's contributors are:

Mary Jo Bang, Robert J. Baumann, Adam Beris, Daniel Borzutzky, Austin Buckingham, Shannon Burns, Nick Chan, Jack Christian, Bryan Coffelt, Cyrus Console, Linh Dinh, Marie Dougherty, Dustin Downey, Shawna Enyart, Ryan Feeney, Miles Fermin, Abbe Findley, Kathleen Furlong, Madeline Gallucci, Angela Genusa, Tyson Gough, Joshua T. Howell, Kristen Iskandrian, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Justin Kemp, Emily Kendal Frey, Mitchell Hugh Kirkwood, Mark Leidner, Christina Lenert, Richard Lucyshyn, Ryan MacDonald, Alice Miller, Sawako Nakayasu, Annie Raab, Osciel Ramos, Sophie Roessler, James Sanders, Jaclyn Senne, Sandra Simonds, Lauren Stookey, Mathias Svalina, Michelle Taransky, Dana Ward, Dara Wier, Teal Wilson, Dziadek Wydra Odjazdowy, Mike Young, and Joshua Zink

ANNE BOYER & MITCHELL HUGH KIRKWOOD

2011-04-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

at Cara and Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64108)

Sunday, April 17th, 7:30pm (sharp)

FREE!

Anne Boyer is the author of The 2000s (Free Poetry), Art is War (Mitzvah), The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House), Selected Dreams with a note on phrenology (Dusie Kollektiv), and Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse (Effing). She has also written some free pdfs, like Ma Vie en Bling 1&2. Her novel Joan is forthcoming from Bloof books, and she is at work on a second novel, Nero, as well as a few other books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Her work has been widely published in journals, and she has been invited to read in a number of cities, but she has never before read in Kansas City, where she teaches about Utopia, Digital Society, and writing at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Mitchell Hugh Kirkwood is from Kansas. He is currently studying sculpture and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. His favorite colors are red and yellow, and he is into highway driving. Go Chiefs!

DANIEL KHALASTCHI,ZACH SAVICH & MARIE DOUGHERTY

2011-02-15T15:09:00.000-08:00

at La Esquina Gallery (1000 W. 25th St., Kansas City, MO. 64108)

Sunday, March 20th, 4pm.

FREE! (But donations to help with the poets' gas and jerky are warmly accepted)

Born and raised in Iowa, DANIEL KHALASTCHI is a first-generation Iraqi

Jewish American. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a

recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is

currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Marquette

University. His first collection of poetry, Manoleria (2011), was

awarded the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Prize, and his poems

have appeared in numerous journals, including Kenyon Review, jubilat,

and Denver Quarterly. He lives in Milwaukee where he is also the

co-editor of Rescue Press.

ZACH SAVICH is the author of three books of poetry, Full Catastrophe

Living (2009), Annulments (2010), and The Firestorm (2011), as well as

a chapbook, The Man Who Lost His Head (2010), and a book of ardent

prose on art and the imagination, Events Film Cannot Withstand, that

is forthcoming from Rescue+Press. He has won the Iowa Poetry Prize,

the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Omnidawn Press’Chapbook Competition,

and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Competition.

His poems, essays, and reviews appear widely in journals such as A

Public Space, Boston Review, and Gulf Coast. He serves as book review

editor with The Kenyon Review.

MARIE DOUGHERTY was born in Kansas but grew up in Durham, North Carolina. She is currently a senior in painting and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. She enjoys anything that's free: open-window-weather, holding other people's babies, and mail, which actually isn't free.