RHP at Boston Court

Red Hen Press partners with Boston Court Performing Arts Center, a venue dedicated to presenting works that are creative, bold, and daring. They strive to challenge the audiences of Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley with diverse programs in an intimate setting. Authors who performed at past events include David Mason, winner of the Colorado Book Award with his novel Ludlow, Peggy Shumaker, the Alaska State Writer Laureate, Carl Phillips, whose Pastoral won the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Pulitzer Prize recipients Rae Armantrout and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Boston Court Performing Arts Center
70 North Mentor Avenue
Pasadena, CA

General admission $10
PSA members, students & seniors $5
Click here for advance tickets
or call 626.683.6883

Upcoming Event
May 22, 2012
7 PM

Featuring:

Kevin Simmonds received a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he started the first-ever poetry workshop in Changi Prison. He has published poems, essays, and reviews in American Scholar, FIELD, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Rhino, and Salt Hill, and in the anthologies Beyond the Frontier, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, To Be Left with the Body, and War Diaries. He has received fellowships, commissions, and grants from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, Creative Work Fund, Fulbright, Jack Straw, Squaw Valley, and San Francisco Arts Commission. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof, the edited edition of the late Carrie Allen McCray’s final work of poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2012), and the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011). He creates and teaches privately inSan Francisco.

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry is entitled The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (BOA Editions Ltd., 2011). She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. Her children’s books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Going North (2004), were listed among TIME Magazine’s top 10 children’s books of 2007 and received the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library in 2005. She has worked as a public librarian and as a professional storyteller, telling stories at festivals around the country. She now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.

Anna Journey’s book of poetry, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia, 2009), was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including The American Poetry Review, FIELD, and The Kenyon Review. Her essays have appeared in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. She is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.

Monica Lee Copeland, a strong, charismatic voice in the recent slam poetry movement who ranked 6th in the 1997 National Poetry Slam, is a veteran performer and writer. Author of Back to Concrete, she writes sobering short stories about family life, low-toned romantic verse, and monologues about community. She is the Host and Executive Director of Indelible Ink: a Vanguard Performance Art Series, which takes place the last Tuesday of every month (except December) in Café Bizou in Old Pasadena.

Moderator:

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America. He is a poet and playwright with degrees in creative writing from the University of Michigan and the University of Houston. Holnes is the recipient of scholarships to Cave Canem, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, various awards, writing fellowships, and writer’s residencies. He and his work have appeared in TIME Magazine, the Caribbean Writer, the Kennedy Center College Theater Festival, on the Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere. Information about his performance art with Preston Witt can be found at www.darrelandpreston.com.