MARATHON READING
poetry, fiction, + banjo
ARK PRESS JUNE
22 7-9
At LOW
(upstairs in Espresso News)
Downtown Boone
HALINA DURAJ
Halina Duraj teaches creative writing at the University of San
Diego, and is so happy to be reading in North Carolina. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in
literary journals including Witness, Third Coast, and Confrontation.
Her novel, Fatherland, was a finalist for the 2010 UC Davis Maurice
Prize in Fiction, and other work has been recommended for the 2009 PEN/O’Henry
Award and the Pushcart Prize.
ERYN GREEN
Eryn Green is a doctoral
candidate at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of
Utah. He has been nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, awarded by the Poetry
Foundation, and recently his collection Eruv was selected by C.D. Wright
as a finalist for the 2011 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize. Eryn’s work has
appeared or is forthcoming in Jubilat, Colorado Review, the tiny, Bat
City Review, H_NGM_N, Word for/ Word, Rhino, Iron Horse Review, Pheobe,
Painted Bride Quarterly, Esquire.com and Denver Quarterly.
CAROLINE KLOCKSIEM
Caroline Klocksiem's poems have appeared
in a variety of journals, including The
Iowa Review; Hayden’s Ferry Review;
The Pinch; BlazeVox; H_NGM_N; and
others. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship recipient and 2011
Pushcart Prize Nominee. Look for her chapbook, Circumstances of the House and Moon, from Dancing Girl Press this
summer. Originally from South Carolina, she holds an MFA from Arizona State
University and teaches English and Literature at the University of Alabama,
where she lives with her husband, son, and orange cats. The first time language
blew her mind was in kindergarten when she realized that "stop" is "pots"
spelled backwards.
ESTHER LEE
Esther Lee is the author of Spit, winner of the Elixir
Press Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, The
Blank Missives. Her poems and articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Hyphen, and
elsewhere. A former Kundiman fellow, she pursues a Ph.D. in Creative
Writing/Literature at the University of Utah and was awarded a Tanner
Humanities Doctoral Fellowship to work on her second book.
PEPPER
LUBOFF
Pepper Luboff is an Oakland-based
poet, visual artist, and freelance writer/editor. She holds a BA in English
from UC Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah.
Her chapbook, And when the time for the breaking, is forthcoming from
Ark Press.
CHRISTINE MARSHALL
Christine Marshall lives and teaches in
Davidson, North Carolina. Her poems have been published in 2009 Best American Poetry, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx,
Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, gutcult,
Nimrod, and Western Humanities Review and featured on Verse Daily. Her current writing project involves poems about
holes, others, and insomnia. The name, Marshall, is derived from her place of
birth in a brightly lit corridor on the planet Mars, and she is, herself,
descended from a majestic line of talking cats.
HAZEL
MCCLURE
Hazel McClure lives and
writes in Grand Rapids, MI, where she's an English and Writing librarian at
Grand Valley State University. She has a black belt in keeping it real
and the t-shirt to prove it. Her work's appeared in Coconut, Mirage
#4/Period(ical), RealPoetic and in the chapbook Nothing Moving from
Lame House Press.
GINA MYERS
Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and
several chapbooks, including False Spring
(Spooky Girlfriend, 2012). Hold It Down,
her second full-length collection, will be published by Coconut Books in 2013.
BRENDA
SIECZKOWSKI
Brenda Sieczkowski's poems
and lyric essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals. Her
chapbook, Wonder Girl in Monster Land, is available from
dancing girl press. A full-length collection, Like Oysters Observing
the Sun, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2013.
MIKE SIKKEMA
Mike Sikkema believes in people who
believe in cryptids, believes in cornbread, in swamp funk, in radical
vernacular. He knows that he is and is not his voice. He gathers poems
and mushrooms, books and friends. These days he's writing a documentary with
Jen Tynes about two mystical/mythical figures often accused of rowdyism, Pepper
and Whiskey.
JEN TYNES
Jen Tynes is the founding
editor of Horse Less Press. She is most recently the author of The
Black Mariah (DoubleCross Press) and, with Michael Sikkema, Autogeography (Black
Warrior Review). She has chapbooks forthcoming from Projective Industries and
Dancing Girl Press.
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We are so grateful to dear friends Mike Sikkema and Jen Tynes for driving down from MI with kiddos Dagan and Celia in tow to bookend our first Ark Series last week. Ark Press is first and last a proposal of company—Kirsten and I were trying to think of a way to spend time with loved ones, to share a place that we love very much with them (and visa versa). The Ark Series and summer workshop has already, absolutely, been a realization of the tremendous energy and generosity of friends deeply committed to poetry and to community building, willing to travel great distances on their own dime to share precious time, writing, and resources with others.
