DANIEL BORZUTZKY, TED KRITIKOS & SUZANNE SCANLON

Saturday, February 23rd, 7pm at The Writers Place (3607 Pennsylvania Ave, KCMO 64111) FREE!

Daniel BORZUTZKY is the author of The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011); The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007) and Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). His translations include Raúl Zurita's Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010) and Jaime Luis Huenún's Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008), among others. His work has been anthologized in, among others, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years (Fence Books); Seriously Funny (University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA (El billar de Lucrecia, 2010). Journal publications include BOMB, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, and many others. Chapbooks include Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull, 2007) and One Size Fits All (Scantily Class Press, 2009). His poems have been translated into Spanish, Bulgarian, French, and Turkish. He lives in Chicago.

Ted KRITIKOS grew up on a farm in Kansas. His stories have appeared in NOON.

Suzanne SCANLON is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy 2012), a collection of fragmented narratives revolving around the lives of young women in an experimental mental health clinic. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, DIAGRAM, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other places. Her writing on theater, teaching, mothering, and travel has appeared in Poets & Writers, The American Scholar, Time Out Chicago and other places.

C.S. CARRIER & JESSI WILSON

Saturday, February 9th, 7pm at Walnut Place Laundromat         (4241 Walnut St., KCMO, 64111) FREE!

C. S. CARRIER is the author of Mantle (H_NGM_N BKS 2013) and After Dayton (Four Books 2008). His chapbooks include Postcard Feat (Hinchas de Poesia 2010), Lyric (horse less press 2008), and The 16s (Katalanché Press 2007). His poems have been published in many journals, including 6x6, Fact-Simile, Horse Less Review, Indefinite Space, Little Red Leaves, and Word For/Word. He has an MFA from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently, he lives in Clarksville, AR and Lafayette, LA, where he’s pursuing in a PhD in English at the University of Louisiana.

jessi wilson lived eighteen years around tulsa, oklahoma, where she used to put words and pictures in the newspaper, and then came to the kansas city art institute for graphic design & creative writing & maybe a life. now she's 7/8 done with her undergrad, and she's pretty sure everything will turn out okay enough. at least, she hopes so.

ADAM BERIS & CARA LEFEBVRE

Thursday, January 24th, 7pm at Cara & Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes St., KCMO 64108) FREE!

Adam BERIS is an artist and writer who was born in Milwaukee, WI. He transplanted to Kansas City, MO where he graduated from the Painting and Creative Writing departments of the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. He currently lives and works from his home studio in the Crossroads District. Adam recently taught at the Art Institute through the PCAL program and as an Adjunct Professor in the Painting Department. 

Cara LEFEBVRE translates for the society of Albanian American writers, is a meal coordinator and caregiver at a shelter for abused & neglected kids, and just recently started a catering business. She is also a member of the englewood business association and is set to open her own gallery in February, so please submit work.

TIMOTHY BRADFORD, GRANT MATTHEW JENKINS & STACY KIDD

Sunday, December 2nd, 2pm
at Cara & Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes St., KCMO 64108)

FREE! But please support the writers by buying their books!

 Timothy BRADFORD’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals including 42opus, Bombay Gin, CrossConnect, DIAGRAM, Drunken Boat, ecopoetics, H_NGM_N, Mudlark, No Tell Motel, Poems & Plays, and Upstairs at Duroc, and his first collection, Nomads with Samsonite, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2011. In 2005, he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award for his novel-in-progress based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and from 2007 to 2009, he was a guest researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University and lives with his wife, two sons, and an ever-changing menagerie just outside of Oklahoma City.

Grant Matthew JENKINS, Associate Professor of English, teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at the University of Tulsa.  He has published two books of poetry, Joy of God and Other Series (Blackbird, 2003) and the most recent in collaboration with Cheryl Pallant, Morphs (Cracked Slab 2009). His poems appear in Birddog, Cannibal, Sugar Mule, Syntax, Action Yes, and Big Bridge. Other creative projects include animated digital poetry, with image and sound, and can be found online at Turbulence.org andYouTube

Born and raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Stacy KIDD earned a BA in Letters and Classics from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, where she held the Walton Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in several journals including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Columbia, Eleven Eleven, The Iowa Review, National Poetry Review, and Witness. She is the author of two recent chapbooks: A man in a boat in the summer (Beard of Bees Press, 2011) and About Birds (Dancing Girl Press, 2011) as well as the forthcoming book of poetry Red House Over Yonder. A former Writer-in-Residence at Art 342 in Fort Collins, CO, she currently is finishing her PhD in English from the University the Utah and teaches at Tulsa Community College.

BAYARD GODSAVE, GEORGE MCCORMICK & ANNIE RAAB

Wednesday, November 7th, 7pm
at Cara & Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes St., KCMO 64108)

FREE! But please support the writers by buying their books!

Bayard GODSAVE is the author of Lesser Apocalypses, a short story collection published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2012. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English & Foreign Languages at Cameron University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. His fiction has appeared in, among other places, the Cream City Review, Cimarron Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Confrontation, the Evansville Review, South Dakota Review and Pleiades, and is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review. He lives and works in Oklahoma.

George MCCORMICK was born and raised in the Inland Empire region of southern California.  He received his MFA from Cornell University and is a recipient of a Constance Saltonstall Grant for Fiction as well as a 2013 PEN/O.Henry Prize.  His stories have appeared in Epoch, CutBank, Hayden’s Ferry Review and The Santa Monica Review, and his story collection, Salton Sea, was recently published by Noemi Press.  He currently works in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University.  He lives in Lawton, Oklahoma and Cooke City, Montana.

Annie RAAB is a writer and sculptor living in Kansas City, MO. She has had work published in a few small online magazines, such as Gobbet Mag and Alice Blue. She divides her time between writing, cooking, art-making, and reading anything that comes too close. She has terrible vision.

JIM MCCRARY, DAVID OHLE & KATIE TWISS

Sunday, October 21st, 4pm

at Cara & Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes St., KCMO, 64108)

Free! But please support the writers by buying their books!

Jim MCCRARY has published a dozen poetry books including West of Mass (Tansy Press, 1992), All That: The Collected Chapbooks (Manypenny Press, 2006) and a series of DIY titles including: Dive She Said, Hotter Than and Now, (Hog Oil Press), My Book, Oh Miss Mary, Mayaland, Es Verdad, ReVeiled (Really Old Gringo Press) and Po Doom and Not Not from Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press which he co-publishes with Steven Tills. His work has appeared in scores of magazines ranging from Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Continental Review, Galatia, Texture, Avec and House Organ. He has a BA and MA from Cal State Sonoma where he studied with David Bromige. He was awarded a Phoenix award from the city of Lawrence, KS for his 'contributions thru literature to the community'. He co-curated the wildly popular Poetry Slam at the Flamingo, a topless dance bar just over the city limits in North Lawrence. Today he helps Megan Kaminski and Sorcha Highland run a poetry series in the basement of a downtown Lawrence dive bar...The Taproom (www.taproompoetry.blogspot.com).

David OHLE’s novel, Motorman, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972 and re-released by 3rd Bed Press in 2004 with an Introduction by Ben Marcus. Its sequel, The Age of Sinatra, was published by Soft Skull in 2004, followed in 2008 by The Pisstown Chaos. In 2009, two novellas, Boons and The Camp were published by Calamari Press under one cover. He has edited two non-fiction books, Cows are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers (Watermark Press, 1991) and Cursed From Birth: the Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. (Soft Skull, 2006). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, the Paris Review, TriQuarterly, the Missouri Review, the Pushcart Prize and elsewhere. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Missouri in Columbia and currently both fiction and screenwriting at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Katie TWISS is the author of several books of fiction written strictly for her mother, all at the age of six, all having to do with cats. She is from Kansas City, Missouri by way of Tulsa, Oklahoma by way of Fremont, California. She is a senior in printmaking and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. She spends a great deal of time driving long, unnecessary distances for fun and drinking copious amounts of tea.

HADARA BAR-NADAV, ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL & JOHN GALLAHER

Wednesday, October 17th, 7pm

at Cara & Cabezas Contemporary (1714 Holmes St., KCMO, 64108)

Free! But please support the writers by buying their books!

Hadara BAR-NADAV is the author of A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize (forthcoming from Saturnalia Books, 2013). Her chapbook, Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press, 2010), was awarded the 2009 Midwest Poets Series Award. She is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. 

Elizabeth CLARK WESSEL is a founding editor of Argos Books & recently became co-editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation. Her poems and translations have appeared in DIAGRAM, A Public Space, Guernica, Sixth Finch, Lana Turner Journal, Jacket2, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Bennett Poetry Prize at Columbia University, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She was born and raised in western Nebraska, and now lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she works as a translator.

John GALLAHER is the author of the books of poetry, Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses, and Map of the Folded World, as well as the free online chapbook, Guidebook from Blue Hour Press, and, with the poet G.C. Waldrep Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, BOA, 2011. His next book will be the book-length essay-poem In a Landscape, coming out in 2015 from BOA. Other than that, he's co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.

MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER, BRANDON BROWN & CHRIS MARTIN

Saturday, September 1st, 7:00pm

at Spray Booth Gallery (Inside Volker Bicycles), 18th and Wyandotte, KCMO, 64108

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

MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER is the author of four chapbooks: In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys, Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions 2009 and 2010), The Bridge (Push Press 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (forthcoming in October 2012 from Ugly Duckling Presse); a collaborative play, I am You This Morning You Are Me Tonight, written with her husband, poet Chris Martin; and the forthcoming full-length collection, Ceremony, winner of the Slope Editions book prize, and due out in February 2013. New poems have recently appeared in epiphany, Boston Review, Iowa Review, la fovea, High Chair, Lungfull, New Orleans Review and elsewhere. She works as a freelance book designer in Iowa City, IA.

BRANDON BROWN’s first two books were published in 2011, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya.) Poems and prose have recently appeared in Postmodern Culture, BPM, Sprung Formal, Model Homes, and Art Practical. In 2012, his debut play Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer was staged at Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theater and his work is currently part of the group show FAX at the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery. He’s from Kansas City, MO and has lived in San Francisco since 1998.


CHRIS MARTIN is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House Press 2011). This August, Flying Object will serially publish CHAT, an eclogue with Cleverbot. It will appear on their website each day for a month with accompanying illustrations by various artists. He is also the author of How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem (Brave Men 2011) and the forthcoming enough (Ugly Duckling 2012). He is an editor at Futurepoem books and lives in Iowa City with his wife, the poet Mary Austin Speaker, with whom he co-wrote a play entitled, I AM YOU THIS MORNING AND YOU ARE ME TONIGHT.

MEGAN KAMINSKI, JUDY ROITMAN & JENNIFER ZIEGLER

Sunday, April 29th, 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)

 Megan KAMINSKI's  first book of poetry, Desiring Map, is forthcoming from Coconut Books (April 2012). She is also the author of six chapbooks, including most recently favored daughter (Dancing Girl Press 2012) and collection (Dusie, 2011). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Everyday Genius, Post Road, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas and also curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence.

Judy ROITMAN lives in Lawrence KS. Her chapbook, The stress of meaning: variations on a line of Susan Howe, was published in 1997 by Standing Stones Press, a second chapbook, Diamond Notebooks, was published in 1998 by nominative press collective, and a third chapbook, Slippage, was published in 1999 by Potes and Poets Press. A book No Face: Selected and New was published in 2008 by First Intensity Press. Ku: a thumb book is forthcoming from Airfoil Chapbooks, and Slackline has just appeared from Hank's Loose Gravel Press. 

Jennifer ZIEGLER lives in Kansas City, MO. She is a recent graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, and is currently working as an independent fine artist in the area. Her first book of poetry, We Grew Fragmentary, is forthcoming from Xlibris, September 2012.

JESSICA BARAN, PHIL ESTES & DAN MAGERS

Friday, April 2oth, 7:00pm

at Irving Amphitheater (Irving Building, Kansas City Art Institute, 4402 Oak St., Kansas City, MO. 64111)

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

JESSICA BARAN is the author of the poetry collection Remains to be Used (Apostrophe Books, 2010) as well as the chapbook of prose sonnets Late and Soon, Getting and Spending (All Along Press, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in Harp & Altar, Sink Review and the Tusculum Review; her art criticism has appeared in Art in America, BOMB Magazine, and the Village Voice, among other journals. She resides in St. Louis, where she's the art writer for the Riverfront Times.

PHIL ESTES' chapbooks are Gem City/Fountain City (Rabbit Catastrophe, 2009) and Children of Reagan (Rabbit Catastrophe, 2012). His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in: The Associative Press, DIAGRAM, Hayden's Ferry Review, Lamination Colony, LUNGFULL!, West Wind Review and others. He lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

DAN MAGER’s first book of poems, Partyknife

(Birds, LLC), was published in spring 2012. He is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal as well as founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations. He lives in Brooklyn.