Alicia Jo Rabins DIVINITY SCHOOL Launch

unnameable

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.

"A Book of Uncommon Prayer" Anthology Features Kate Angus, Alicia Jo Rabins

Augury Books’ founding editor, Kate Angus, will be featured in Outpost19‘s A Book of Uncommon Prayer, an anthology of “everyday invocations,” due out in May 2015. Angus appears alongside Alicia Jo Rabins, a recent winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and reader for our offsite AWP event in 2014, as well as a myriad of other known talents, including Marie Howe, Bob Hicok, Leslie Jamison, Catherine Lacey, and Rick Moody. The anthology is edited by Matthew Vollmer, and all proceeds from book sales will go to 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that is dedicated to supporting creative and expository writing skills in students ages six to eighteen.

To preorder the anthology, see Outpost19’s site.

Alicia Jo Rabins Wins 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Alicia Jo Rabins, friend of Augury Books and reader at our 2014 offsite AWP event, has won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for 2015.

The winning manuscript, Divinity School, will be published in September with distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. Read “Chute” from Divinity School, which has previously appeared on our site.

Find out more about Rabins and the Book Prize.

Our readers for the Augury Books & Friends Offsite AWP Reading

We’re so excited for the upcoming Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. We have a great list of readers (see below), each of whom will read briefly and then we will make new friends and maybe even fall in love during the post-reading mingling. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S this Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels.  If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us!

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

Our readers (in alphabetical order) will be:

Maureen Alsop, author of MANTIC (Augury Books, 2012), has new poems appearing at Watershed Review, Citron Review and ditch.

Halina Duraj‘s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Harvard Review, FictionWitness, and other journals. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. In 2012, she was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island, WA. She teaches at the University of San Diego, where she also directs the Lindsay J. Cropper Center for Creative Writing. She is the author of THE FAMILY CANNON (Augury Books, 2014), now available.

Alison Espach is the author of The Adults, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year, and a “Barnes and Nobel Discover Great Writers” pick. Her other writing can be found in McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Salon, The Daily Beast, Glamour, Writer’s Digest and other journals. Her short story “Someone’s Uncle” is available as an e-book through Scribner.

Lia Hall writes in neon. She co-founded Noble Neon illuminating words and shapes with noble gases. She teaches yoga and lives in the Old Rainier Brewery in Seattle. She received her MFA in Poetry at the New School in 2009.

Lauren Hunter is from North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and works with the team at Telephone Books as their Managing Editor. Lauren is the co-founder/curator of the Electric Pumas, a reading series/revolution in New York City. Her chapbook, My Own Fires, was released by Brothel Books in 2011.

Cynthia Lowen is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and poet, and author of The Cloud That Contained the Lightning, winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series selected by Nikky Finney. Cynthia is the recipient of the 2013 Women Authoring Change Fellowship from William Morris Entertainment, the DuPont-Columbia University Awards for Excellence in Journalism, and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as residencies to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hedgebrook, and Yaddo, among others. Cynthia is also the producer and writer of BULLY, a feature documentary film following five kids and families through “a year in the life” of America’s bullying crisis, which was released in theaters worldwide by The Weinstein Company. She lives in New York City.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, as well as two chapbooks. Her poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Seattle Review, West Branch, Subtropics, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast and coordinator for the Houston Indie Book Fest and Gulf Coast Reading Series.

Patrick Moran is a 1995 graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is the author of four books of poetry, Tell A Pitiful Story, (MWPH, 2011), Doppelgangster (Main Street Rag Press, 2012), THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, (Augury Books 2012), Rumors of Organized Crime, Poems & Plays’ 2013 Tennessee Chapbook Prize winner. He is also the author of “The Ampersand: Casual Vortex or Engraver’s Shortcut,” which appeared in the 2013 September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. His poems and translations have appeared in many journals including the New Republic, The Antioch Review, The Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review and The Boston Review. He is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.  His lives in Fort Atkinson, WI with his wife, the painter Bethann Moran, and their three children.

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 & CommentaryBoston Review, Denver QuarterlyThe Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts ReviewPleiadesWestern Humanities Review, and others. Originally from Sullivan’s Island, SC, she received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently earning her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she is poetry editor for Gulf Coast Magazine. She is the author of BEAST (Augury Books, 2014), now available.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet and musician currently based in Portland, OR. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, 6×6, Boston Review, Court Green, Ploughshares and The Collagist.  She tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, a song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, and has performed fiddle music across Central America and Kuwait. Residencies and scholarships include Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets

Camille Rankine is the author of Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Octopus, Paper Darts, and  Tin House. She was selected for a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2013, and was named an Honorary Cave Canem Fellow in 2012. She is Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College, Editorial Director of The Manhattanville Review, and lives in New York City.

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire (Harper Perennial, 2008) and Skinny (Harper Perennial, 2011). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, O The Oprah Magazine, CNN Living, Paris Review, GQ, Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, and Southern Review, among other publications; as well as in a number of anthologies, including, most recently, Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader (W.W. Norton, 2013) and True Tales of Lust and Love (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2014). She is the recipient of an MFA degree from the University of Montana, a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, a LABA Fellowship from the 14th Street Y, residencies from the Anderson Center and Portsmouth Abbey School, and a fellowship from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. She is also a six-time Moth StorySLAM winner whose stories have been featured on The Moth podcast and The Moth Radio Hour.

A poem by Alicia Jo Rabins

We are very excited to present work from our readers at the upcoming Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S on Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels. If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us!

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

 Chute

Each time a baby is born
the universe squeezes itself
through a chute,
the same chute
into which
suicides squeeze themselves.
Its mouth
is lined with small iron teeth.
When you bathe your father
who has become like a child,
you feel the teeth
on your fingers.
When your father asks
who you are,
it means his legs have been
sucked in.
For you the tunnel’s
mouth is closed;
for him it is open
and oiled.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet and musician currently based in Portland, OR. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, 6×6, Boston Review, Court Green, Ploughshares and The Collagist. She tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, a song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, and has performed fiddle music across Central America and Kuwait. Residencies and scholarships include Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.

Chute by Alicia Jo Rabins

Chute

Each time a baby is born
the universe squeezes itself
through a chute,
the same chute
into which
suicides squeeze themselves.
Its mouth
is lined with small iron teeth.
When you bathe your father
who has become like a child,
you feel the teeth
on your fingers.
When your father asks
who you are,
it means his legs have been
sucked in.
For you the tunnel’s
mouth is closed;
for him it is open
and oiled.

 

 

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Alicia Jo Rabins
is a Brooklyn-based poet, performer and composer who received her MFA from Warren Wilson. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, 6 x 6, Boston Review, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press) and Horse Poems (Knopf). As a musician she tours internationally; her original art-pop song cycle about Biblical women, Girls in Trouble, was released in October 2009 and she is the violinist in Golem, NYC’s punk-klezmer band.  She also holds a Masters in Jewish Women’s Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary and tutors bar and bat mitzvah students online.
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