Today we are very pleased to announce that Alicia Jo Rabins’ second collection of poems, Fruit Geode, has garnered a Finalist spot in Poetry at the National Jewish Book Awards.
If you haven’t checked out the book yet, dive in here: https://augurybooks.com/fruit-geode-by-alicia-jo-rabins/
A big shout-out to Kate Angus, her editor, & Moshe Schulman, her publicist, for all the good work they’ve done with the collection.
Upcoming Performances
Saturday October 6 – Portland, OR
Fruit Geode book launch/performance!
@ Mother Foucault’s Bookshop with fiction writer Mat Johnson
523 SE Morrison St.
7 pm, free
October 20-21 – Seaview, WA
Airstream Poetry Festival @ Sou’wester!
Alicia reads, performs & teaches @ this festival at the inimitable Sou’wester Lodge
more details here
$15, call (360) 642-2542 for lodging or more info!
Thursday, October 25 – Northampton, MA
Fruit Geode launch reading/performance
@ Iconica Social Club, 7 pm door, 7:30 show
BYOB, snacks & drinks available for purchase
Sunday, October 28 – Fruit Geode NYC launch reading/performance!!!
14th St Y Theatre, 344 E 14th St
An evening of Jewish Women Writers from the West
with novelist Rebecca Clarren & poet Lynn Melnick
Q&A to follow
free and open to public, details coming shortly
Saturday, November 10 – Portland, OR
Alicia reads @ the Portland Book Festival!
Thursday, November 15 – San Francisco
Fruit Geode launch reading/performance
at Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative
3130 24th St, SF (in the Mission)
a double book-launch with the wonderful Jake Marmer!!!
free!
Sunday, November 25 – Baltimore
Fruit Geode book launch reading and performance!!!!
at The Ivy Bookshop
6080 Falls Road
Baltimore, MD 21209
5 pm, free and open to the public ** note this is an afternoon reading**
Monday, November 26 – NYC
Alicia reads & performs at The Poetry Project
131 E 10th Street @ 2nd Ave
w/Vi Khi Nao
8 pm, $8/$5 members, tickets here
Wednesday, November 28 – Hadley, MA
class visit, Mt Holyoke college
Thursday, November 29 – Exeter, NH
@ the Word Barn
66 Newfields Rd, Exeter, NH 03833
details tba, open to the public!
December 23-27, Birmingham UK
Alicia reads & performs at Limmud UK!
Open to conference attendees only
Welcome, do-gooders! You’ve landed here because you’ve donated your time or money to a progressive cause and are looking for some summer reading!
Augury Books and Brooklyn Arts Press want to thank you for your good work. We are attempting to find ways we can make a difference, which means supporting individuals and organizations that resist, stand strong, speak out, demonstrate, and support each other. Not just in a single way, but in whatever myriad ways we can, because a lot of what we care about is under attack and it won’t end by utilizing one solution.
So in the spirit of supporting those who are helping others, we invite you to:
*visit the Augury Books and BAP websites and make your selection from the authors listed below
*let us know if you prefer an ebook or a pdf of your selected book
*email us (augurybooks@gmail.com) a screenshot of your donation receipt to any of the following social organizations (or any other like-minded progressive groups); or email us a paragraph detailing any current activist roles you hold in your communities.
*get a free book!
Please allow up to 2 weeks for books to arrive.
Some of our favorite orgs: Ali Forney Center, Coalition for the Homeless, Doctors Without Borders, Equal Justice Initiative, The Innocence Project, Lamda Legal, Planned Parenthood, National Center for Trans Equality, RAINN.org, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), Sierra Club, Social Justice Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, World Central Kitchen.
Thank you!
Kate Angus & Joe Pan
__________________________________________
Augury Books
www.augurybooks.com
augurybooks@gmail.com
Authors
Arisa White
Carey McHugh
Halina Duraj
Joe Pan
Justine Post
Randall Horton
Sara Schaff
Brooklyn Arts Press
www.brooklynartspress.com
info@brooklynartspress.com
Authors
Alex Green
Alexander Boldizar
Anaïs Duplan
Carol Guess
Daniel Borzutzky
Dominique Townsend
Erika Jo Brown
Heather Morgan
Jay Besemer
Joe Fletcher
John F Buckley
Martin Ott
Martin Rock
Matt Runkle
Matt Shears
Michael Ernest Sweet
Michelle Gil-Montero
Noah Eli Gordon
Paige Taggart
Seth Landman
Augury Books is delighted to announce our 2019 titles! Congratulations to t’ai freedom ford whose poetry collection & more black, chosen from our January Open Reading Period, will be published in the spring, and Arisa White, whose hybrid-memoir Who’s Your Daddy? will be published in the fall.
This year we received over 550 submissions during our open reading period and were thrilled to discover so many manuscripts of great promise. We commend the many talented authors who sent us their work and are grateful for the opportunity to read their manuscripts!
About the author:
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is available from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.
About the book:
From the author: & more black is a collection of what ford calls “Black-ass sonnets” that take their cues from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets. For ford, the word “American” conjures the spirit of her ancestors. In that way, the poems are rebellious, outspoken and, as she says, “take no shit.” They investigate Black art, Black bodies, Black sexuality, and Black language, unapologetically and with a capital B.
About the author:
Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White is the author of Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved and Black Pearl. Her book You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened was nominated for the 29th Lambda Literary Award and the chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer and trans people of color. She serves on the board of directors for Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor at Colby College. arisawhite.com
About the book:
Arisa White’s Who’s Your Daddy?, a hybrid memoir combining poetry and creative nonfiction, is a meditation on paternal absences, intergenerational trauma, and toxic masculinity. Who’s Your Daddy? asks us to consider how the relationships we are born into can govern us, even through absence, and shape the dynamics we find and forge as we grow. White lyrically moves across distance and time, from Brooklyn to California to Guyana. Her book enacts rituals that plumb the interior reaches of the heart to assemble disconnected and estranged parts into something whole, tender, and strong.
Thanks for everyone that stopped by our booth at AWP in Tampa this year, we had a blast meeting new folks, seeing some old friends, dining in Ybor City, and selling a lot of Augury books!
Thanks also to everyone who brought soaps and other toiletries from their hotels to our booth, as we were able to drop off several donation bags at the Bonnie Center at Alpha House, which helps homeless pregnant woman and women with children. You can find photos over at the Brooklyn Artists Helping tumblr.
We are very proud to announce that Arisa White’s You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened has been selected to appear on the 2018 Over the Rainbow Recommended Book List. This list of outstanding books is selected by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. The Over the Rainbow committee has this to say about You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened: “A gorgeous, intelligent poetry collection from Lambda Literary Award-nominated White. These poems burst with emotion, soaring to ecstatically loving highs and capturing the sorrows of longing and black lesbian life in a vicious world. A beautifully realized and joyful read that deserves a place in poetry collections and the canon of lesbian literature.”
Congratulations to Arisa White and our heartfelt thanks to the Over the Rainbow committee.
January 1-31, 2018
We will for the entire month of January accept submissions for full-length collections of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. There are no restrictions on length. We cannot accept anthologies or translations at this time, nor can we accept work from current and former students of editor Kate Angus, but anyone from anywhere in any stage of their career can send any manuscript they otherwise feel fits within these parameters.
To submit, click here to go to our Submittable page!
We are now an official imprint of Brooklyn Arts Press! We couldn’t be happier about this new collaboration and the innovative and beautiful books we look forward to bringing into the world as part of the Brooklyn Arts Press family.
As BAP’s imprint, Augury Books will continue to publish two new books each year under our name. In fall of 2018, we are excited to publish Fruit Geode by Alicia Jo Rabins, and we will open for submissions for our second book beginning January 1st. We’ll be looking at poetry, short story collections, and creative nonfiction so if you have a manuscript you’ve been polishing up, we’d love to read it.
Augury Books’ editorial board remains the same. You can continue to reach Founding Editor Kate Angus, Associate Editor Kimberly Steele, and Assistant Editor Nicolas Amara at augurybooks@gmail.com or through Augury’s social media accounts. Our back catalog books will continue to be available through Small Press Distribution (SPD), in bookstores, on Augury Books’ website, and on Amazon.
Taken from HocTok’s website.
Arisa White’s You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened recently received a review, as well as a featured poem, on HocTok. Based in DUMBO, Brooklyn, HocTok is structured as a round table group, where artists convene communally on a piece to discuss and record their findings. Of You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, it was noted that
Arisa White is a lover, a wordsmith, a connoisseur of real life in all its hues and shades, ups and downs, smiles and cries of joy and sadness. She does not promote herself as an authority on matters of perfection in finding love, being in love or holding on to love. But her poetry certainly gives a crispy clear picture of the immensely rich world the author embodies.
To read more of the feature, and to learn more about HocTok, you can visit their website.
Next Wednesday, June 1, from 7:00-8:30pm, Pen and Brush will host its most recent reading from their curated series “Pen and Brush Presents…” with Augury’s Carey McHugh representing Augury Books. Other readers will include Laura Sims (Ugly Ducking Presse) and Jennifer L. Knox (Bloof Books). Admission is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served, and copies of books will be available for purchase and signing. We hope to see you there!
For more information, please see the Facebook event.
Jennifer L. Knox is reading on behalf of Bloof Books. The New York Times Book Review wrote that her new book, Days of Shame and Failure, “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” Jennifer is the author of four books of poems; her work has appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, and Bomb. She teaches at Iowa State University.
Carey McHugh‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and Tin House. Her chapbook Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c. was selected by Ray Armantrout for the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She lives and works in Manhattan. She is reading on behalf of Augury Books.
Laura Sims is the author of Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016). Her first book, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and in 2006 she was awarded a US-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship. In 2014 she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist. Her poems have recently appeared in Black Clock, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven and Gulf Coast. Sims has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and a co-editor of Instance Press since 2009. She teaches literature and creative writing at NYU-SPS. Laura is reading on behalf of Ugly Duckling Presse.
This reading series is curated by Kate Angus for Pen and Brush (www.penandbrush.org). For over 122 years, Pen and Brush has been the only international nonprofit organization offering an outlet for women in both the literary and visual arts in the city of New York.