Podcasts about essay press

This week we're talking about a lyric essay that was first published in 2002 and has since become part of a new canon of creative nonfiction: Jenny Boully's "The Body," which first appeared in The Seneca Review and was re-released in book form by Essay Press. The big question of this episode: are we smart enough to understand this piece, which is written in footnotes to an invisible text? Or is it even a thing meant to be "understood" in a traditional narrative sense? Is it a beautiful evocation of a language that's just beyond conventional meaning? Is it a whole bunch of word salad? And, seriously, are we big dummies who just barely manage to get our pants on each morning? Also this week: In Mike's continuing search for a good donut, he pits two bitter Pennsylvania rivals against each other. That's right, it's Sheetz vs. Wawa. If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps us make a bit of money each month and keep the show going. For just $5 a month, you'll get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we visit some of the weirder, goofier corners of the literary world. Recently, that's involved reading a paranormal romance novel, the debut novel of Jersey Shore's Snookie, and the novelization of the movie Robocop.

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes: “I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.” Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together. And the book has an excellent trailer, which you can find here. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes: “I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.” Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together. And the book has an excellent trailer, which you can find here. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes: “I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.” Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together. And the book has an excellent trailer, which you can find here. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Season 2, Episode 43 - In Memory of Joshua Casteel (Dec. 1979-Aug. 2012) Tommy​ and I are honored to present this special episode in memory of the life of Joshua Casteel. Joshua was a classmate of ours at Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We're honored to have Joshua's mother, Kristi Casteel, join us on The Curiosity Hour Podcast to talk to us about her son's life. Joshua Casteel was a United States Army soldier, conscientious objector, writer, playwright, and divinity student. He was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in a Christian Evangelical family to parents Rick and Kristi Casteel. While Joshua displayed early interest and skills in various arenas, including sports, music, theater, writing, and academics he chose to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and father by attending West Point Military Academy. From his first experience with military life, questions began to surface as to whether he was ‘a fit' for military life and philosophy. After much deliberation, he realized he decided he needed to leave West Point. He enrolled at the University of Iowa and graduated with honors with a multidisciplinary major in Literature and the Arts with an emphasis in Philosophy. After 9-11, he felt he was constrained to fulfill his initial military commitment. He served with the Army's 202nd Defense Battalion as an interrogator at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, arriving six weeks after revelation of prisoner abuses by US personnel at the prison. After spending six months in Iraq and experiencing the realities of war and violence first hand, all the while struggling with the ethical and theological questions pertaining to his job and identity as a Christian soldier his military career finally came to an end. Years of study, counsel, prayer, and first hand experience ultimately led him to apply for conscientious objector. The Army approved his application and granted him an honorable discharge in 2005. Joshua went on to graduate from the University of Iowa in 2008 with a dual Master of Fine Arts Degree in playwriting and non-fiction writing. He was an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and the author of several plays performed in the US and abroad, including Returns and The Interrogation Room. His play will be performed as an opera in the UK in 2018. During the seven years between his return from Iraq and his death, he was featured writer for several magazines and a public speaker on religious and political matters around the world. He was featured in the documentary films Iraq For Sale: War Profiteers and Soldiers of Conscience. Excerpts of Casteel's emails from Iraq were published in Harper's Magazine and in book form by Essay Press, entitled Letters From Abu Ghraib. A second edition was published by Wipf and Stock Publishing in July, 2017. Prior to his death Joshua was at work on his memoir entitled, No Graven Image. He was attending the Divinity School at the University of Chicago at the time of his diagnosis. Before he died he was honored for his work towards justice and peace. Joshua died of lung cancer in New York City in New York Presbyterian Hospital on August 25, 2012. The Joshua Casteel Foundation was formed to carry on his legacy of nonviolence, working towards peace, justice and reconciliation in the world in ways that respect and honor the value of human life. Website (check after December 1, 2017): http://joshuacasteel.com Special thanks to Kristi Casteel, Rebekah Casteel Latchis, Naomi Casteel Thompson, Erin Gullickson, Christopher Merrill, Chad Nicholson, Shawn T. Storer, Rachel Swanson Hillestad,Cory Thompson, Jeffrey J. Weiss. Special thanks to Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan for permission to use excerpts from Soldiers of Conscience by Luna Productions (http://lunaproductions.com/soldiers-of-conscience-the-movie/) The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund.

This is a special podcast episode with some help from the folks over at One Book, a signature program of the Free Library of Philadelphia that promotes literacy, library usage, and citywide conversation by encouraging the Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing… This is a special podcast episode with some help from the folks over at One Book, a signature program of the Free Library of Philadelphia that promotes literacy, library usage, and citywide conversation by encouraging the Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing a single book. This year’s book is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. We started the evening with a round of Slam, Bam, Thank you, Mam, or improv reading game. Listen in and see what we created in 5 minutes! The writers came at the themes of the book from so many angles, but the one they each had in common was they blew us away.If you’re old enough, imagine the dude (and his martini glass) getting blown away by the sound from his Maxell tape (if you’re too young to remember that iconic image, Goolge it)—it was like that. Or, just look at this: via Flickr And then listen to the podcast and feel the same way! Let us know what you think on our Facebook event page or on Twitter with #OneBook Read on!   Kalela Williams is a fiction writer whose most recent work appears in Calyx: A Journal of Art & Literature by Women, and Drunken Boat. She also directs One Book, One Philadelphia, a Free Library of Philadelphia program with the goal of promoting citywide conversation around the themes in a single book. She is currently working on a novel.   Cindy Arrieu-King is an associate professor of creative writing at Stockton University and a former Kundiman fellow. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus 2010), Manifest (Switchback 2013) and a collaboration with the late Hillary Gravendyk (1913 Press 2016). Find her at cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com.   Thomas Devaney is a poet and lives in Philadelphia. His books include Runaway Goat Cart (Hanging Loose, 2015), Calamity Jane (Furniture Press, 2014), and The Picture that Remains (The Print Center, 2014). His nonfiction book Letters to Ernesto Neto (2005) was published by Germ Folios. He is the 2104 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His collaborations with the Institute of Contemporary Art include “The Empty House,” for The Big Nothing, and “Tales from the 215” for Zoe Strauss’s “Philadelphia Freedom.”   Patrick Rosal is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, including his latest, Brooklyn Antediluvian. A former Senior Fulbright Research Fellow, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Grantland, Harvard Review, Tin House, The Best American Poetry and dozens of other magazines and anthologies. He has been a featured performer in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and hundreds of venues throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center. He is currently an Associate Professor at the MFA Program of Rutgers University-Camden.   Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. She is the author of two books of poetry—Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Valley Fever, both from Sidebrow Books, and of the recent chapbook Like Fur, from Essay Press. She lives in Philadelphia, coedits Jacket2, and directs the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.       M.C. Extraordinaire: Paul Siegell   The Lineup: Kalela Williams Cindy Arrieu-King Thomas Devaney Patrick Rosal Julia Bloch   Engineering Producer: Joe Zang  

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook. So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reflecting on a Nuclear Legacy When your family is from Hiroshima, you have strong feelings about the nuclear age, war, and its legacy.Who better to talk about the fallout of our nuclear past than artists? And better, artists who come from cities that were affected and involved. Visual artist Yukiyo Kawano takes her grandmother’s kimono and sews replicas of the bombs that were dropped on her city. She has made Little Boy and Fat Man sewn with her own hair. In a new creation, she has partnered with performance artist Meshi Chavez and poet Allison Cobb to create “A Moment in Time.” How is art an act of activism? Host Amy Pearl, Hatch Innovation Guests Yukiyo Kawano, Visual Artist Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivor) grew up decades after the bombing of Hiroshima. Her work is personal, reflecting lasting attitudes towards the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kawano’s main focus is her/our forgetfulness, her/our dialectics of memory, issues around cultural politics, and historical politics. For the latest project, she used pieces of translucent kimono fabric and sewed together with strands of her hair (the artist’s DNA as a third generation hibaku-sha), for the possibility of looking inward, suggesting another/personal view to our official receptacle of memory. During the school show in Vermont, Kawano performed in front of the object in desperation about the urgency of expressing fears about the devastation of our human bodies. The historical conjuncture, with the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the legacy of the nuclear era opened up a space for the performativity of her/our questioning of history, memory, witnessing, and disaster in the present moment. Kawano is currently living in Portland, Oregon. email address: yuki@yukiyokawano.com Allison Cobb, Poet Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press); Green-Wood (Factory School); Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press); and After we all died forthcoming in September 2016 from Ahsahta Press, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Cobb’s work combines historical and scientific research, essay, and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She was a 2015 finalist for the National Poetry Series; a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading, art, and performance series. Meshi Chavez, Performance Artist Meshi Chavez lives and creates work in Portland Oregon. Meshi’s most recent productions include Being Moved,“...or be dragged.” and  We Two Boys. His work has premiered in both New Mexico and Oregon. In this episode you’ll hear How artists and art represent the impacts of science, war, and powerlessness What is Bhuto dance, and how it is a perfect medium for expression and collaboration How a speech by President Obama inspired a poem of sound and words to be shared How art activates a space for contemplation, catharsis, and healing, which is more important (sometimes) than acting Why art is key to helping make invisible things felt and experienced, and why this is so important   Links to Resources Mentioned Hatch Innovation Hatch Oregon  

Amaranth Borsuk's most recent book is As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), a collaboration with Andy Fitch. She is the author of Handiwork, and, with Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen. Abra, a collaboration with Kate Durbin forthcoming from 1913 Press, recently received an NEA-sponsored Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and will be issued as an artist’s book with an iPad app created by Ian Hatcher this year. Amaranth is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics. Andy Fitch’s most recent books are Sixty Morning Walks, Sixty Morning Talks, and (with Amaranth Borsuk) As We Know (Subito Press, 2014). Ugly Duckling Presse soon will release his ebook Sixty Morning Walks. With Cristiana Baik, he is currently assembling the Letter Machine Book of Interviews. He has dialogic books forthcoming from 1913 Press and Nightboat Books. He edits Essay Press and teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program.

August 30, 2014. What is creative nonfiction? What makes it creative? How do writers of this genre approach their subject matter and tackle some of its inherent challenges? National Endowment for the Arts Literature Director Amy Stolls moderated a discussion with creative nonfiction writers Paisley Rekdal and Eula Biss about their work and experiences with such issues as research, sticking to the facts, points of view and marketability. Speaker Biography: Award-winning author Paisley Rekdal is a writer of diverse scope, publishing work in such genres as contemporary nonfiction and poetry. She has been the recipient of many accolades, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes and a Fulbright fellowship. The daughter of a Chinese-American mother and a Norwegian-American father, her latest work, "Intimate: An American Family Photo Album" (Tupelo Press), blends genres of photo album, personal essay, poetry, memoir and historical documentary to create an innovative literary product. Through lenses of race, family, identity and society, this hybrid memoir narrates the stories of Rekdal's parents, the photographer Edward S. Curtis and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. Speaker Biography: Eula Biss is an award-winning nonfiction author. She has been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She is following up her award-winning title "Notes from No Man's Land" with a new contemporary nonfiction book, "On Immunity: An Inoculation" (Graywolf). Inspired by the experiences and fears that accompany new motherhood, this fascinating text analyzes the myth and metaphor of medicine and immunization. Biss investigates what vaccines mean for children and larger society, exploring both historic and present implications, and also extending the conversation to meditate on ideas presented in Voltaire's "Candide," Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and other notable works. In addition to writing books and articles, Biss is also the founder and editor of Essay Press and a professor at Northwestern University. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6384

Episode #107! Featuring an interview with Andy Fitch, editor of 60 MORNING TALKS, and a review by David Campos of Matthew Zapruder's SUN BEAR! Music by El Amparito and Vic Chesnutt ("Flirted With You All My Life.") Andy Fitch's most recent book is Sixty Morning Talks. Ugly Duckling soon will release his Sixty Morning Walks and Sixty Morning Wlaks. With Cristiana Baik, he is currently assembling the Letter Machine Book of Interviews. He has collaborative books forthcoming from 1913 and Subito. He edits Essay Press and teaches in the University of Wyoming's MFA program. *** Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon 2010), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as a book of prose, Why Poetry, forthcoming from Ecco Press in 2015. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Tin House, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Bomb, Slate, Poetry, and The Believer. He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX. An Assistant Professor in the St. Mary's College of California MFA program and English Department, he is also Editor-at-Large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, CA.

Carla Harryman and Barrett Watten give poetry readings at the Circadian Rhythm Café. Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright. She has published thirteen single-authored works, including 'Adorno's Noise' (Essay Press, 2008) and 'Open Box' (Belladonna, 2007), and has received numerous grants and awards including from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America, the American Embassy in Romania, and the Fund for Poetry. Barrett Watten is a language-centered poet, critic, editor, and publisher. Some of his publications include 'Bad History', a nonnarrative prose poem “including history,” (Atelos, 1998) and ''Progress/Under Erasure, in a combined edition, (Green Integer,2004). He edited 'This', one of the central publications of the Language school of poetry (1971-82), and co-edited 'Poetics Journal' with Lyn Hejinian, featuring writing on poetics by poets and academics. 9 July 2014

Carla Harryman and Barrett Watten give poetry readings at the Circadian Rhythm Café. Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright. She has published thirteen single-authored works, including 'Adorno's Noise' (Essay Press, 2008) and 'Open Box' (Belladonna, 2007), and has received numerous grants and awards including from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America, the American Embassy in Romania, and the Fund for Poetry. Barrett Watten is a language-centered poet, critic, editor, and publisher. Some of his publications include 'Bad History', a nonnarrative prose poem “including history,” (Atelos, 1998) and ''Progress/Under Erasure, in a combined edition, (Green Integer,2004). He edited 'This', one of the central publications of the Language school of poetry (1971-82), and co-edited 'Poetics Journal' with Lyn Hejinian, featuring writing on poetics by poets and academics. 9 July 2014

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The author of more than ten books in a range of genres as well as numerous performance works, Carla Harryman's recent publications include Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2006), Toujours l'epine est sous la rose (Ikko, 2006: tr. Martin Richet), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001). A collection of conceptual essays, Adorno's Noise, is forthcoming from Essay Press this spring. Recent performance pieces in Detroit, Montreal, Germany and Austria have featured bilingual choral improvisation and sound manipulation. She is also a participant in The Grand Piano collaboration, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers originally identified with Language Poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since her 1995 move out of the Bay Area, she has lived in Detroit. She currently teaches at Wayne State University, Naropa Institute, and the Bard College Milton Avery School of the Arts.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The author of more than ten books in a range of genres as well as numerous performance works, Carla Harryman's recent publications include Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2006), Toujours l'epine est sous la rose (Ikko, 2006: tr. Martin Richet), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001). A collection of conceptual essays, Adorno's Noise, is forthcoming from Essay Press this spring. Recent performance pieces in Detroit, Montreal, Germany and Austria have featured bilingual choral improvisation and sound manipulation. She is also a participant in The Grand Piano collaboration, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers originally identified with Language Poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since her 1995 move out of the Bay Area, she has lived in Detroit. She currently teaches at Wayne State University, Naropa Institute, and the Bard College Milton Avery School of the Arts.