Archive for November, 2014
Pegasus Reading Series: Cure, Gabbert, George, and Jacob!
WordSpace @ Two Bronze Doors presents, our fourth installment of The Pegasus Reading Series, a new monthly forum for poets and writers to showcase their work in the DFW area. This month we showcase the work of Logen Cure, Mag Gabbert, Luca Jacob, and more!
Logen Cure is a poet and teacher. She is the author of two spoken word projects: the Make it Memorable EP (2014) and In Keeping, a chapbook published by Unicorn Press (2008). Her work also appears in Word Riot, Radar Poetry, IndieFeed: Performance Poetry, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Texas with her wife.
Mag Gabbert is a PhD student at Texas Tech with a specialization in creative writing, specifically in poetry and non-fiction. She graduated with a bachelors in English from Trinity University and received her MFA in poetry writing from The University of California at Riverside. Mag is a contributing writer for The Nervous Breakdown, where her essays regularly appear.
Her poetry, essays, and reviews have also been published or are forthcoming in The Rattling Wall, The Rumpus, and The San Antonio Current, among others. Mag has previously served as the co-editor of The Trinity Review and associate poetry editor of The Coachella Review; she is now an associate editor of Iron Horse Review and is the graduate advisor of Texas Tech’s undergraduate literary journal, The Harbinger.
Chris George lives and works in Dallas, Texas where he is the resident writer at Two Bronze Doors art gallery and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Disembodied Text. His work has been featured in a number of journals, including The Arts United, Spiderweb Salon, and LUX. His chapbook Dreamscapes was published by Micro-Micro Press in 2013.
Lucas Jacob’s poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in several dozen journals, including Southwest Review, Barrow Street, and Potomac Review, and are forthcoming in many others, including Western Humanities Review. A past winner of the Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Contest, he was short-listed for the Fish Poetry Prize (2012), was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Poetry Prize (2013), was a semi-finalist for the Norman Mailer Award in short fiction (2012), and was a semi-finalist in the Frost Place Chapbook competition (2014). He lives in Fort Worth, and he teaches and does arts-program-administation work at the Trinity Valley School, where he is humbled by his students, who are terrific except in their refusal to live by his classroom motto: “No cats.”
Fan View: Martha Heimberg talks about Kay Ryan
When: Thursday, June 4, 7 pm
What: Salon: Fan View: Martha Heimberg talks about Kay Ryan
RSVP for location: wordspace@wordspace.us
Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), andSay Uncle (2000). Her bookThe Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Ryan’s tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the end of tenure, Ryan called herself a “whistle-blower” who “advocated for much underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation.”
Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world. Her quizzical, philosophical, often mordant poetry is a product of years of thought. Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” Critic Meghan O’Rourke has written of her work: “Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them.” “Sharks’ Teeth” displays that meandering approach to her subject matter, which, Ryan says, “gives my poems a coolness. I can touch things that are very hot because I’ve given them some distance.”
Kay Ryan is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has received the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award, as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Since 2006 she has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Martha Heimberg, presenter, has been writing about theater, the arts and historic preservation for over 30 years for numerous Texas newspapers and magazines, including Dallas Weekly, D Magazineand Texas Monthly. She currently writes a weekly theater column for Turtle Creek News. She has won awards from the Dallas Press Club and the Texas Historic Commission, and is a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum. She coordinates DART’sPoetry in Motion program, and has served many years on the WordSpace board. Her degrees in English and comparative literature are from Southern Methodist University. She is associate professor of English at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas.
Angela Ards Book Release Salon
Friday, February 5, 7:30 pm
Book Release: Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era (University of Wisconsin Press)
Bonus: Darryl Dickson-Carr will conduct an interview with Professor Ards
Bonus #2: Hosted by Sanderia Faye
RSVP for location: 214-838-3554, wordspace@wordspace.us
Angela Ards has published extensively on African American literature and culture in the post-civil rights era, a historical moment that demands recalibrated ways of thinking about black identity as questions of gender and class complicate allegiances and agendas previously based on race. Her book examines how writers bring their lived experience to bear on crafting both a language and a politic that might account for this new stage of African American history. She received her PhD from Princeton University and teaches at SMU.
“Ambitious, timely, engaging, and provocative. Angela Ards, erudite and remarkably widely read, situates her analysis of a new political ethic grounded in black women’s experience at the intersection of autobiography studies, feminism, black literary history, and cultural and political theory.”
WordSpace @ Tyler Davis Festival
All Day! Multiple Artists! Mighty Fine Arts, To the Ends of the Earth, Oil and Cotton, Ant Colony, and More.
Founded in 1994, WordSpace presents over 50 annual programs with poets, prose writers, songwriters, playwrights, performance artists and scholars across the broadest possible spectrum.
WordSpace is made up of working writers, artists and educators dedicated to connecting Dallas literary scene with the widest possible audience. It was founded with the determination to encourage and develop emerging local writers and performers by offering a paid honorarium. Many of these writers have gone on to receive prestigious awards and author success.
Their wide range of activities include celebrity-writer events. Performers have included Laurie Anderson, Nikki Giovanni, Sandra Bernhard, John Waters, Amy Sedaris and Dan Savage.
WordSpace sponsors an innovative Next Generation Project with annual student readings, monthly open mics, students reading in Salons alongside published writers, and free writing workshops. The WordSpace Summer Intern program host paid university students around the country.
