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.

Augury Books at the 5th Annual New York City Poetry Festival

The New York City Poetry Festival, put on by the Poetry Society of New York , will celebrate its 5th year on July 25th and 26th, with two full days of readings on three stages at Governors Island. This year’s line up includes Augury’s own Joe Pan  (Hiccups, 2015) and Carey McHugh (American Gramophone, 2015), as well as Nick Flynn, Amanda Smeltz, and Kiki Black, among many others. McHugh and Pan will be reading Saturday, 12 PM at the Algonquin Stage.

Join the festival both Saturday and Sunday between 11 AM to 6 PM, with a Vendor’s Village of booksellers, artists and craft makers, and food truck catering. Admission is free — don’t miss out!

Check out the Festival’s website for a full line up of each day, directions, and any additional info.

 

Augury’s Reading Period Is Open for Prose and Poetry May 1 – July 31, 2015:

Submit now via Submittable, and thank you for your interest in Augury Books!

INTERVIEW: Angee Lennard on the 11th Annual Printers Ball

This year marks the 11th annual Printers Ball, a day of performances, live printmaking demos, and exhibitions surrounding poetry and literary culture. Founded in 2004 by Poetry magazine’s Art Director Fred Sasaki, Printers Ball strives to bring together printers, writers, publishers, artists, readers, collectors, students, teachers, makers, and consumers. This year, the Ball will be hosted by Spudnik Press Cooperative at the Hubbard Street Lofts in Chicago, with a central theme of “push and pull.”

Angee Lennard, founder and director of Spudnik Press Cooperative, discussed the event in depth with Augury’s assistant editor, Nicolas Amara.

 

Nick: What prompted this year’s theme of “Push & Pull”?

Angee: Despite how short and sweet the theme is, there was a ton of thought behind it. This year, we had two big goals in mind. First, we plan for this Printers Ball to be more tactile than ever. The Printers Ball Marketplace features publications and prints that are best enjoyed and appreciated in their physical form. The Spudnik Press Printshop will be hosting a variety of workshops allowing guests to run our presses and make their own prints. The Steamroller Spectacular will be highlight the tactile-ness of print. The physicality of pushing and pulling indicates our hands-on approach to this festival.

Second, we want to deepen the level of conversation among participants and guests. We’ll have more ways for guests to contribute their own voice. “Push & Pull” signifies to us complete engagement from everyone involved, including attendees, and hints at the healthy tension that can come from true dialogue.

 

Nick: Spudnik’s mission states that the cooperative was “founded on the premise that art should be a democratic and empowering medium.” The press release for this year’s Ball emphasizes that festival programs aim to blur the line between author and audience, creating an interactive, collective environment. Is this break down of hierarchy integral to the Ball’s mission?

Angee: This is a very acute observation, and in short, I do believe that Printers Ball has no need for traditional hierarchy. The event has always been first and foremost a celebration. It is an event for everyone: professional poets, readers, hobbyist writers, printers, students, self-publishers, and the simply curious.

When we began planning the 2015 Printers Ball, we gave a lot of thought to the evolution of Printers Ball. Since Printers Ball began, and perhaps in part because of Printers Ball, Chicago has seen tremendous growth in the number and quality of reading series and small press publishers. For example, Curbside Splendor host fantastic pop-up book shops year round and throughout the city. Sector 2337 grew out of Green Lantern Press, and has a permanent brick and mortor location. We felt that the level of artistic output in Chicago is fantastic and that we could fill a different role than simply presenting work. We craved dialogue, and we hoped that this could be a place for the creative community to not perform, but to talk with each other about their art form, their city, and their community, and leave invigorated. Luckily, this all ties in very nicely with our democratic mission and how we approach all programming at Spudnik Press Cooperative!

 

Nick: What role do you see Spudnik and the Printers Ball playing in the larger surrounding community? Though it is clear both are going strong, given this is the Ball’s 11th year, how has reception been?

Angee: This Printers Ball will be the third that Spudnik Press has organized and hosted, and each year keeps getting better. Spudnik Press offers rich programming year round that in ways address the same goals as Printers Ball (community, collaboration, and artistic production). However, Printers Ball allows us to present programming on a scale that is usually beyond our means. Printers Ball allows us to think much bigger and connect with an impressively broad audience. Under Spudnik’s pervue, we have been able to expand the scope of Printers Ball by getting our entire building involved and bridging poetry with photography, design, installation, and traditional printmaking. Printers Ball has always been a free-spirited event with reinvention every few years, and I expect it will continue to evolve as our larger surrounding community does the same.

 

Nick: Aside from showing up the day of, how can artists, writers, and other community members get involved with the Ball?

Angee: One way for artists to be involved is through contributing a carved woodblock to our Steamroller Spectacular. We’ve collected carving from about 300 artists, ranging from middle school students to professional artists. On Saturday, June 27th, all blocks, collaged in various 8-foot long combinations, will be printed in our parking lot using a construction steamroller. We are also seeking lightly used and affectionately discarded books for our Printers Ball Book Drive, benefiting Open Books. Publishers can also contribute books to our “Book Butcher,” where guests can order different cuts of magazines and books from revered publishers, big and small, across the nation.

Once people do show up, there are endless ways to get involved. G.E.E.E. is asking writers to stop by Plantlets for Poems, and select a few donated poems to read aloud. Story Club Chicago will give audience members the chance to perform live at Printers Ball. The more serious, round table conversations include “Gender, Sex, and Honesty,” “Curation as a Tool to Intersect Communities,” and “The Intersection between Art, Politics, and Community Building.” In the Printshop, we’ll have presses running all day with an ongoing collaborative letterpress poem project, screenprinted tattoos, mononprinting, and more.

For more information, visit the event website.

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Augury Books’ spring/summer 2015 reading period is now open for submissions in poetry and prose. For guidelines and general information, please visit our submissions page.

Please Support the 5th Annual New York City Poetry Festival

Albert Robida’s Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000 (1902), courtesy of the Public Domain Review

The New York City Poetry Festival, now approaching its 5th year running, has become an important and much anticipated event for the poetry community of NYC. Hosted by The Poetry Society of New York, the festival gathers over 200 poets on Governor’s Island for readings and other poetry-related matters.

The festival is normally free for all who attend, including the vendors, poetry organizations, and general public. This is only possible due to the generous donations received from those who can afford to give them.

Unfortunately, there have been significantly less donations this year. And if the fundraising goal of $12,000 isn’t met by May 21st, this could result in the festival being notably scaled back. We therefore encourage all who are able to donate to do so. Please tell your friends and family as well.

To contribute to the the 5th annual New York City Poetry Festival, go to their Kickstarter.

You can also help spread the word through HeadTalker by allowing them to post to your Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr on your behalf.

Joe Pan To Lead Brooklyn Poets’ Yawp

From Shin-Bijutsukai (1901-1902), courtesy of the Public Domain Review

Augury author Joe Pan will be leading Brooklyn Poets‘ Yawp on March 9th. A monthly event, Yawp consists of a writing workshop at 7 PM, followed by an open mic night at 8. The primary focus for this month’s Yawp will be the evolution of poetry throughout the writing process. It will take place at 61 Local, and admission is $5 for nonmembers.

To learn more about Yawp, visit the Brooklyn Poets website.

Joe Pan’s book, Hiccups, or Autobiomythography II, is forthcoming from Augury Books in 2015.

More on Joe Pan

Mayapple Center Offers Scholarships to Study with Pulitzer Winner Vijay Seshadri

Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities

The Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities, a nonprofit center in Stamford, Connecticut, is offering two half-scholarships to study with Vijay Seshadri, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The class is called Transitions and Transfigurations and runs from August 18 — August 22 on Mayapple’s campus.
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The focus of this weeklong workshop in the rhetoric of nonfiction prose writing—which will be understood as encompassing everything from personal essays and memoirs to high-end literary journalism to lyric essays of the sort that obliterate the distinction between nonfiction and poetry on the one hand and nonfiction and fiction on the other. Students will examine the ways in which prose is made to move and develop and create meaning and feeling through that movement, as well as read and dissect essays and memoir fragments by writers ranging from Nabokov, Orwell, Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to contemporaries such as Anne Carson, Vivian Gornick, and John D’Agata.
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Vijay Seshadri is the author of the collections Wild KingdomThe Long MeadowThe Disappearances,and 3 Sections, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His essays, reviews, and memoir fragments have appeared in periodicals such as The New YorkerThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Threepenny ReviewThe American ScholarVerse, and in the anthologies The Anchor Essay Annual—Best Essays of 1998 and Best Creative Nonfiction (2008). A former editor at The New Yorker, he is currently the Michele Tolela Myers Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was for over a decade the director of the college’s nonfiction writing program. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and a MFA from Columbia University and has received grants from the New York Foundation from the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the James Laughlin Award.
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The Mayapple Center cultivates imagination through artistic and intellectual cross-pollination in a distinctly 21st century climate. The Center is dedicated to sustainability and its serene lake and peaceful landscape of trees and gardens serve as a retreat to inspire its residents. Activities such as swimming, tennis, canoeing, yoga and meditation promote a strong sense of community among residents, with an emphasis on mindfulness. Meals are partially prepared from organic produce from Mayapple gardens, and locally-sourced food is served at every meal.
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If interested in applying for the scholarship, please send an email inquiry to michelle.slater@mayapplecenter.org with your CV and writing sample immediately. The program cost is $1,200 and each scholarship is for $600. You can find out more about the program here.

June 7: Frances Justine Post Reads at Fowler Project Space in Brooklyn

Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014) will be reading on Saturday, June 7th at 6 p.m. at the Fowler Project Space in Brooklyn. The reading, “Bonus Round,” organized by Luke Degnan and sponsored by BOMB Magazine, is the culminating event in the month-long Fowler “Game Show” exhibition, which “examines how the games we play mirror the human condition.” The exhibition includes video, installation, sculpture, photography, and collage by featured artists Ted Carey, Susan Fang, Kurt Freyer, Elizabeth Hoy, Shanjana Mahmud, Emilie Selden, and BEAST cover artist Cecelia Post.

For the Bonus Round reading, Justine Post will be joined by Jack Christian (FAMILY SYSTEM), Michael Coffey (ELEMENOPY and 87 NORTH, Coffee House Press), poet and critic Vincent Katz, and author and Conjunctions managing editor Micaela Morrissette.

Don’t miss Bonus Round and the last night of the Game Show exhibition! Find out all you need to know about the event and the readers here on Fowler’s site.

More on BEAST

 

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

PICS from Federal Dust and Cabin/Fire’s Joint Reading

Two Baltimore reading series, Federal Dust and Cabin/Fire, joined forces earlier this month to throw “Federal Fire,” their first joint reading and cook-out. Hosted by Justin Sirois and Matthew Zingg, the reading featured Michelle Dove, Mark Cugini, Eric Nelson and Adam Wilson.

There were well-crafted words. There were hot dogs. There were marshmallows, a fire pit and a giant Mother’s Day card. A good time was had by all—see the pics below!

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Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Michelle Dove reads at Federal Fire

Mark Cugini reads at Federal Fire

Justin Sirois with giant Mother’s Day card at Federal Fire

Eric Nelson reads for Federal Fire

Adam Wilson reads for Federal Fire

 

PICS: Justine Post Talks at Houston MenilFest Indie Book Panel

Frances Justine Post Speaks at Houston MenilFest—Photo by Brenda Cook

This year the Houston MenilFest, an annual one-day festival of visual, literary and performing arts (“Art, Words, Noise”), featured Augury Books’ Frances Justine Post (author of BEAST, 2014) in its Indie Book Panel, Approaches to Publishing Your First Book, with fellow participants Martin Rock, David Tomas Martinez, Matthew Salesses and Jonathan Wells.

Frances Justine Post with former students Gabrielle Langley and Stacy Nigliazzo

If you’re in the Houston area, see Justine next read at Brazos Bookstore’s Monday night event (May 19th, 7 p.m.), “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Hustle a Beast.” She will be reading with Elizabeth Lyons, Karyna McGlynn (I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems, Sarabande Books, 2009), and David Tomas Martinez (Hustle, Sarabande Books, 2014).

Read this great blog post about the upcoming Brazos reading from Inprint’s Open Book Blog.

More on BEAST

Look for BEAST new from Augury Books

 

 

 

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

PICS: Halina Duraj Reads at D.G. Wills

Thanks to everyone who came out on Saturday night to see Halina Duraj—2014 O.Henry Prize recipient and author of THE FAMILY CANNON (Augury Books, 2014)—read at D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla, CA. Thanks to Dennis Wills for the amazing venue and the wonderful audience for their enthusiasm and support. See photos from the event below.

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

 

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

 

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

Courtesy Halina Duraj and D.G. Wills Books

 

More on THE FAMILY CANNON

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Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!