Archive for August, 2014
Arte de las Americas Fest
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Peter Anderson and Alex Lemon
In Salon: Peter Anderson and Alex Lemon
When: Thursday, October 2, 7 pm
Where: Private Home, RSVP: 214-838-3554 or wordspace@wordspace.us
Refreshments served: Thank you to Spiral Diner and Ben E. Keith!
Please join us for an evening of new works by exciting writers Peter Anderson and Alex Lemon.
Peter Anderson hails from South Africa, but currently resides in North Texas where he is an associate professor of English at Austin College. The author of a previous collection of poems, Vanishing Ground, his work in fiction and poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines and has been anthologized in both America and South Africa. The Unspeakable is his first novel.
Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir and four poetry collections: Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts and most recently, The Wish Book. An essay collection is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His writing has appeared in Esquire, American Poetry Review, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Kenyon Review, AGNI, New England Review, The Southern Reviewand jubilat, among others. Among his awards are a 2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is an editor-at-large for Saturnalia Books, the poetry editor of descant and frequently writes book reviews for the Dallas Morning News. He lives in Ft. Worth, Texas, and teaches at TCU. He has a cool website too. Click Here.
Spiral Diner owner, Sara Tomerlin.
Spiral Diner & Bakery opened its door on August 21, 2002. But first, let’s go back a little further than that. The founder of Spiral Diner & Bakery, Amy McNutt, while making a short film about factory-farmed cows in California she learned about the heartless practices of the dairy and egg industries. Overnight this experience turned the long time vegetarian into a vegan. Amy began to research and study the plight of animals, soon extending her studies to environmentalism as well. She began to take part in educational activism and tried her best to keep an open dialogue with people about Veganism and its relation to the environment. In doing this she discovered that most people, once they have a total understanding of Veganism, agree it’s a necessary step for survival on this planet. However, they have difficulty changing their lifestyles for lack of access to information and most importantly, GOOD VEGAN FOOD. So, after a year of working in the film industry Amy decided to move on to her other love: Food. In an attempt to provide delicious cruelty-free and organic food to those who need it most she left L.A. and moved back home to Texas where she opened Spiral Diner in Fort Worth.
The original location was a small lunch counter at the Fort Worth Rail Market in downtown. There was only 800 square feet of kitchen space, 5 employees, and less than ten items on the menu! After being open a few months Amy and James started dating and after only two months they got hitched. Turns out that James was an old school vegan foodie himself so he quit his lucrative job as a bounty hunter and immediately joined Amy to help run Spiral.
After a year and a half at the Rail Market Spiral was bursting at the seams. The customer base was growing and growing and they were running out of space in the kitchen. They needed a bigger and better place. With financial support from Amy’s wonderful mom and many regular customers who came on board as lenders the move to Magnolia was on. They found an old gutted building in the Near Southside and along with the landlord’s help were able to fix it up. And on their second anniversary Spiral Diner Fort Worth was born anew. With fancy new digs and expanded menu Spiral quickly became a Fort Worth institution and a destination for vegan travelers. All the while they kept a great core crew of employees that stuck with them through thick and thin. In 2007 Spiral pulled off a real coup: The little vegan restaurant in Cowtown, TX was awarded Best Vegetarian Restaurant in America by VegNews magazine!
(That’s right, Texas!).
In 2006, Sara Tomerlin, a recent TCU grad and longtime Spiral employee decided she wanted to share good vegan food with the rest of DFW and she asked if she could open a Spiral Diner in Dallas. Since Sara’s the best, Amy said “yes”. In February of 2008, after two long years of planning and location hunting, Spiral Diner Dallas opened its doors. Located in a beautiful old neighborhood in Oak Cliff, Spiral Dallas has quickly become a second home for many locals and for the 20 employees who work so hard to make the place awesome.
In January of 2008 Spiral Fort Worth’s wonderful and amazing longtime manager, Lindsey Akey, took over ownership of Spiral Fort Worth. Lindsey’s supernatural work ethic and brains for miles make Spiral Fort Worth awesome. As does the positivity and hard work of our 20 Fort Worth employees who work their little butts off every day in the name of good vegan food and
cool customers.
Today, Amy and James still own and run the company as benevolent overlords while Lindsey and Sara own and run their respective locations. This allows them have more time to work on recipes, teach cooking classes, work on filmmaking and plan the opening of an art house theater in Fort Worth. They love their customers and co-workers who have given them the opportunity to do what they love most… save animals and watch movies!
Spiral Diner & Bakery is a 100% vegan and mostly organic restaurant in the middle of “Cowtown” (Ft. Worth). In addition to always serving delicious vegan meals that appeal to both herbivores and carnivores, Spiral Diner pledges to:
WordSpace @ Oak Cliff Cultural Center Block Party
When: Saturday, August 9th
Where: Block Party! Jefferson Blvd, Oak Cliff
Who: Next Generation
Join us in celebrating the 4th Anniversary of the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, home of our Oak Cliff Next Generation free writing and performance workshops. Staffed by Rafael Tamayo, Tisha Crear and Gerardo Robles this facility near the Texas Theater provides the neighborhood with a huge cultural impact. Gallery exhibitions, monthly Verse and Rhythm events, kids camps and so much more.
It’s a Block Party with dancers, performances, vendors, food, and more-See ya there!
WordSpace Season KickOff Party @ The Wild Detectives
You are invited to join WordSpace board of directors and staff to celebrate the unveiling of our 2014-15 season.
We’ll be having drawings for a WordSpace t-shirt and 2 tickets to see…who?
When: Monday, September 8, @ 7 pm
Where: The Wild Detectives
Who: The Whole Wordspace Gang
Free Appetizers will be served.
Cash Bar.
Anne Waldman Night and Day
NIGHT: Performance May 8, 8 pm @ The MAC
DAY: Master Classes, May 9, Time 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. @ The MAC
Tickets: PreKindle
$25 -Performance Only
$75 Master Classes plus Performance
$200 One-on-One One Hour Master Interview plus Performance
All Events at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 3120 McKinney Ave.
WordSpace has become known for presenting such icons as John Waters and Laurie Anderson. Anne is on that same level of accomplishment.
Anne Waldman has been a force in the American literary scene since the 1960’s. As well as being a poet of remarkable power and an electrifying performer, she has been involved in shaping the way young poets are taught in America, and in the joining of poetry with the music scene. Her political activism has also served as a model of engagement within the artistic community.
FIVE FACTS ABOUT ANNE WALDMAN
1966 – Founding member of the Saint Marks Poetry Project, New York City
1974 – Founding member with Allen Ginsberg of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado
1976 – Travels with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue
1978 – Busted along with Allen Ginsberg and Daniel Ellsberg protesting at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Boulder Colorado
2011 – Elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Yet she remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times.
She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, including George Schneeman, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, and Pat Steir, and the theatre director Judith Malina. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre and ran for nearly three months in New York City in 2010. She has also been working most recently with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “a counter-cultural giant.”
“Cyborg on the Zattere,” with music by composer Steven Taylor and 12 performers, including cellist Ha-Yang Kim and reed instrumentalist Marty Erlich and a Renaissance trio, premiered at the Douglas Dunn Salon in Spring of 2011. This “Poundatorio” takes on the “knot” of Ezra Pound, his poetics and politics. It includes settings for parts of the Pisan Cantos.
A prominent figure in the beat poetry generation and New York poetics lineage, Anne Waldman, was born in Millville, New Jersey, on April 2, 1945, and grew up on MacDougal Street in New York City. She received her BA from Bennington College in 1966. From 1966 until 1978 she ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, reading with fellow poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Immediately following her departure from St. Mark’s, she and Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
She is the author of over 40 books and small press editions of poetry and poetics, including, most recently, Gossamurmur (Penguin, 2013); The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011), a 700-page epic poem 30 years in the making. She is the Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa University
The Legendary ANNE WALDMAN–Don’t miss it!
Read an interview with Anne Waldman over @ Rain Taxi
Vist her website to learn more here.
