Due to this weekend’s blizzard and unstable travel conditions, we’re sad to report that tomorrow’s Alicia Jo Rabins/Augury Family reading at Unnameable Books has been moved tentatively to Monday, April 11 at 7 pm. Follow the Facebook event for updates and information and we hope we’ll be seeing you there in April!
Author: joepanic
List of Women Run Presses by Augury Editor Kate Angus
Orchi’s flower via New York Public Library’s Digital Collections
On Tuesday, Augury founding editor Kate Angus provided us with a much-needed resource over at Vida: Women in Literary Arts. Kate recently went looking for a list of women run presses and after her search turned up empty handed, she decided it was high time to write the list herself. Kate takes us through the process she went through herself to compile the list—unsurprisingly not the quickest tally to make, as the faces and heads of so many presses are men. But the final product is one that we hope all readers will be able to use in the future, whether looking for literary events, new prose, or a home for their own work. Head over to Vida to see the complete list.
Alicia Jo Rabins DIVINITY SCHOOL Launch
This coming Tuesday, January 26th at 7 PM, Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn will host a night of reading and celebration by and for various Augury authors as well as a launch for Alicia Jo Rabins‘ Divinity School. Among the authors present will be Joe Pan, Frances Justine Post, and Augury’s founding editor Kate Angus. Join us for what will surely be a night of wonderful prose and great company.
Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, musician, and Torah scholar. She was born in Oregon and grew up in Baltimore and New York City. Alicia’s poems appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, 6×6, The Boston Review, and elsewhere. She teaches ancient Jewish texts to children and adults and performs internationally as a violinist and singer. Alicia lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, daughter, and son.
Joe Pan is the author of two collections of poetry, Hiccups (Augury Books) and Autobiomythography & Gallery (BAP). He is the publisher and managing editor of Brooklyn Arts Press, serves as the poetry editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic and small press editor for Boog City, and is the founder of the services-oriented activist group Brooklyn Artists Helping. His piece “Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper,” a hybrid work about drones, was excerpted and praised in The New York Times. In 2015 Joe participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program on Governors Island. Joe attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, grew up along the Space Coast of Florida, and now lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Frances Justine Post is the recipient of the “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize, the Inprint Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize, and the Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, and others. Originally from Sullivan’s Island, SC, she received her MFA from Columbia University and her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She lives in the Hudson Valley of NY.
Kate Angus is a founding editor of Augury Books. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including Indiana Review, Subtropics, Court Green, Verse Daily, The Awl, The Rumpus, Best New Poets 2 and Best New Poets 2014. She is a recipient of the “Orlando” prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation, as well as Southeastern Review’s Narrative Nonfiction prize and American Literary Review’s award for Creative Nonfiction. A former Writer in Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, she has also received residencies from the Writer’s Room at the Betsy Hotel in South Beach, the Wildfjords trail in Westfjords, Iceland, and the BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy. She is a Creative Writing Advisory Board Member for the Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities and a Guest Literary Arts Curator for the nonprofit arts organization Pen and Brush, where she curates the “Pen and Brush Presents…” reading series. Her collection, So Late to the Party, is forthcoming in Spring 2016 from Negative Capability Press.
Augury's Carey McHugh interviewed on the Tin House blog
Le spectre de la rose by Valentine Hugo, 1912 via New York Public Library.
Yesterday on the Tin House blog, Robert Ostrom shared a recent conversation with Carey McHugh about her book American Gramophone, taxidermy, and flying, among many things.
CM: …There’s a lot of taxidermy in the book. And in fact, we had this one deer head hanging in our living room for a long time. It was a deer that my dad had shot, and I was always appalled by it. I didn’t understand it. Why was it inside the house? Why did it have eyes? I remember being really young and looking up at it, and I remember this panic but also intrigue. How did this come to be here like this? And sometimes they’d take it down to dust it and I’d just pet it and be like, “Is it creature? Is it ornament? What is this thing!?”
It’s a reminder, maybe, of some history that I visit but don’t completely enter. Because I don’t hunt like my dad and my uncles and my brother. I’m a vegetarian in fact. But it’s something that’s always been present in my life. There was always talk of camo and bird dogs and guns. It wasn’t like those things were foreign objects. They were always in the mix somehow. And that’s so foreign to my life now that I think I go back there in my memory and I try to pull it up somehow and understand it.
Come for McHugh’s always wise musings on poetry, memory, and the writing process, stay for the smart (and adorable) questions Ostrom relayed from his seven year-old niece.
American Gramophone is available for purchase online through Amazon.
Poetry Finalist Ben Gantcher's Zombie Defense Guide
Ben Gantcher, one of this year’s poetry finalists, recently shared with us an idea for a free, print on-demand publishing house. On his website, Gantcher has listed two poems from Doctor Caliban—the finalist selection of his we featured last month—as well as a chapbook, Strings of Math and Custom, and an unmade book, Zombie Defense Guide. All titles are available for download and can easily be printed and folded into a book free of cost. The idea is to bolster independent and self-publishing, one foldable book at a time.
Ben Gantcher’s Zombie Defense Guide.