Tim Seibles @ South Dallas Cultural Center

0 CommentsWednesday • August 5, 2015 • by admin

When: Thursday, March 3, 7:30 pm
What: African Diaspora: New Dialogues
Where: South Dallas Cultural Center

Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles is an Old Dominion University professor, and nationally acclaimed poet.  He’s also an 80s Dallas Poetry Scene OG! We’re delighted to welcome Tim back home.

His most recent collection of poems, “Fast Animal,” was a 2012 National Book Critics Award finalist.

Seibles is the author of several collections of poetry, including “Hurdy-Gurdy,” “Hammerlock” and “Buffalo Head Solos.” An associate professor of English and creative writing at ODU, he has been on the university faculty for the past 17 years. Seibles is also a visiting faculty member for the Stonecoast Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine.

A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Seibles has also been a writing fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poetry is featured in several anthologies, including: “Rainbow Darkness,” “The Manthology,” “Autumn House Contemporary American Poetry,” “Black Nature,” “Evensong,” “Villanelles” and “Sunken Garden Poetry.” His poem “Allison Wolff” was included in “The Best American Poetry 2010.”

Seibles is a native of Philadelphia. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts and honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Misericordia University.

About South Dallas Cultural Center and Vicki Meek: The South Dallas Cultural Center is a community center with a wide variety of programs inspired by the vibrancy and diversity of the African Diaspora. The SDCC seeks to educate and inspire through the visual, media, literary and performing arts. Vickie Meek is the award winning director of SDCC. She is a curator, artist and activist. Her decades of service to promote art and racial equity have profoundly impacted the cultural life of Dallas and development of a whole new generation of African American artists. In 2016, Ms. Meek will retire from her office at SDCC to co-develop The Institute for Creative Research in Puerta Viejo, Costa Rica.

WordSpace Season Launch Party with Special Guests Amber Tamblyn and Derrick Brown

0 CommentsWednesday • June 10, 2015 • by admin

When: Thursday, September 17, Party starts at 7:00pm. Performance starts at 8:00pm.

Where: The Wild Detectives (Oak Cliff)

Hosted by WordSpace: Charles Dee Mitchell, RockBaby, Sara Cardona, Jean Lamberty, Steve Cruz, Jerry Kelley, Laney Yarber, Richard Bailey, and Karen X Minzer. 

Last year the WordSpace Season Launch Party gathered around 50 friends and supporters for a night of drinks, conversation, and presentations. This year we are making the party bigger in every way. Poets Amber Tamblyn and Derrick Brown have been causing a scene wherever they go with their Lazers of Sexcellence Tour. On September 17, they will be performing free on the outdoor stage at The Wild Detectives.

Here’s the thing about Amber Tamblyn: How many poets have a resume that includes a story arc on Two and Half Men and a stint as guest blogger for The Poetry Foundation?  I’m pretty sure that puts Amber in a field of one. Amber Tamblyn is an actress and a poet. If you are a woman in, say, your late twenties or early thirties, you probably remember her as the eponymous  Joan of Arcadia. Since then she has continued to act and  to publish four well-received books of poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who knows about these things, said of her first collection, “A fine, fruitful gestation of throbbingly nascent sexuality, awakened in young new language.” Roxanne Gay described her latest book, Dark Sparkler, as “astonishing.”

Derrick Brown is a poet, performer and publisher based in Austin, Texas. As a slam poet, he has performed in over 1800 venues ranging from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, to The Glastonbury Festival in the UK and The Sorbonne in Paris. (The one in France.) His 2012 collection Strange Light won Texas Poetry Book of the Year. In 2004, he founded Write Bloody Publishing which to date has out close to 100 books. And, like Amber, Derrick is not without acting credits. In 2014 he provided the voice of Mappy in Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

This duo has been touring the country with The Lazers of Sexcellence, described as a “ruckus…of poetry, comedy and music.” Come out to enjoy the show, hear what else WordSpace has planned for the year, grab a $1.00 taco (while they last) and select one of the happy hour specials at The Wild Detectives Bar.

BUT WAIT!  THERE’S MORE!

September 17 is North Texas Giving Day, the day when a portion of every dollar you give to one of the participating non-profit organizations earns matching funds from The Dallas Communities Foundation.

WordSpace is a non-profit, and we are participating. As the day approaches, your in box will no doubt fill with reminders from every school, museum, theater, dance company, and wildlife rescue organization you have ever crossed paths with. Please be generous and think of WordSpace. Donations must be made on the internet through the NTGD portal, but WordSpace will have volunteers standing by to make the process as quick and painless as possible. (Or you can give at home during the day.)

THE WORDSPACE PLEDGE TO YOU: Our fundraising will not slow down the fun on September 17.

Kelly Luce

0 CommentsTuesday • January 27, 2015 • by admin

What: First Hearings
Who: Kelly Luce
Where: The Wild Detectives, 314 West Eighth Street, Dallas, TX 75208
When: March 12, 2015. 7 PM

Hosted by: Charles Dee Mitchell

Kelly Luce grew up in Brookfield, Illinois. After graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in cognitive science, she moved to Japan, where she lived and worked for three years. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, the Kerouac Project, and Jentel Arts, and has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, Electric Literature, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, and other magazines. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and Austin, Texas, where she is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is her first book.

WordSpace @ Tyler Davis Festival

0 CommentsFriday • November 7, 2014 • by admin

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.

Beat Poetry Festival Workshops with Chuck Taylor and Christopher Carmona

0 CommentsWednesday • August 27, 2014 • by admin

What: Dallas is the site of the 2014 Beat Poetry Festival. In conjunction with this free featival, WordSpace sponsors Chuck Taylor’s Memoir workshop and Christopher Carmona’s poetics workshop.
Where: Lucky Dog Books, 633 W. Davis St.
When: The festival begins on Thursday, November 6 and runs through Saturday night, November 8. The workshops are 10-12 for Memoir, and 12-2 for Poetry. Both workshops are free. 

Registration for the festival is open until October 16th and more information can be found here. More coming on venues and readers for this beatific festival coming soon.

The Beat Poetry Festival was founded by a group of Texas poets, inpsired by the movement made famous by writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, The 4th Annual Beat Poetry Festival will be held this year in Dallas, TX on Nov. 6-8. Organizers Christopher Carmona and Chuck Taylor will be offering workshops.

Christopher Carmona was a nominee for the Alfredo Cisneros de Miral Foundation Award for Writers in 2011 and a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, the Sagebrush Review, and tecolote. His first collection of poetry called beat was published by Slough Press and his second book, I Have Always Been Here is published by Otras Voces Press. He is also editing a Beat Texas anthology called The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson and is working on a book called Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Poetics with Isaac Chavarria, Gabriel Sanchez, & Rossy Lima Padilla to be published by University of New Mexico Press in 2015. Currently he is the organizer of the Annual Beat Poetry and Arts Festival and the Artistic Director of the Coalition of New Chican@ Artists. Visit his website here.

Chuck Taylor is a Texas Yankee reared in Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, and North Carolina, won the Austin Book Award for his collection, What Do You Want, Blood? He has worked in the Poets- in-the-Schools program, been a CETA poet in Salt Lake City, operated a used bookstore, worked in the laundry of a hospital, labored for the Terrill State Mental Hospital and the Texas School for the Deaf, owned a small press, and is the former Coordinator of Creative Writing at Texas A&M University. Conversations with the poet Lucien Stryk in 1967 stimulated his interest in Asian culture and he was able to work and study in Japan from 1991-94. Married three times, he has three children, three stepchildren, and six grandchildren. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including most recently, Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon (Pecan Grove, 2008).

Yoga & Poetry benefiting Next Generation Youth projects

0 CommentsMonday • June 23, 2014 • by admin

What: Monday night yoga and reading
When: Every Monday night, 6:30-8 pm
Where: Atma Bhakti Yoga Center, 6315 Lindsley Ave, Dallas, TX 75223 in East Dallas, near Lindsley Park
Who: Karen X and You
Proceeds benefit WordSpace Next Generation programs.
Suggested Donation $5-15.

Atma Bhakti Yoga Center offers a weekly Monday night yoga class at 6:30 to benefit WordSpace Next Generation youth education projects.

Taught by an Experience Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT  500 hour), this gentle yoga class culminates with a writing exercise and open floor reading by participants. Or bring your own rigorously self-investigative poems to share.

Thor Johnson @ 2014 Visual Speed Bump Tour of Art

0 CommentsTuesday • May 6, 2014 • by admin

What:  Thor Johnson (ArtSpeak Series)
When: Saturday May 17th, 7:00 pm
Where: Mighty Fine Arts, 409 N Tyler

In conjunction with the day-long Visual Speed Bump Tour of Art Tour in Oak Cliff, WordSpace presents performance art with Thor Johnson. The notorious Thor Johnson direct from his recent acclaimed solo art show will seek to further enlighten and amaze with his poetic revelations, unexpected consequences and stark truth and lies.