RHP in NYC

Red Hen Press presents four annual reading series in New York City to parallel its own four in Los Angeles. The press hosts events at Cornelia St. Café, KGB Bar, The Players Club, and Poets House, bridging the gap between the nation’s coasts.

Red Hen at KGB Bar

March 15, 2013 @ 7 pm

Featuring:

New York Times bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, Mira Bartók is an artist, NPR commentator and author of twenty-eight books for children. Her writing has appeared in literary journals, magazines and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she mentors other writers and runs Mira’s List, a blog that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world. Along with her drummer and music producer Doug Plavin, she is also co-founder of North of Radio, a multi-media collaborative.  You can find her at: http://www.mirabartok.com.

Katharine Coles is the author of five collections of poems and two novels. In 2010, she traveled to Antarctica to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program; The Earth Is Not Flat comprises poems from that project. She is a full professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Utah, where she founded and co-directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.

B.H. James was born and raised an only child in Galt, California. He attended Catholic schools and had a dog named Pepsi. He went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo where he majored in Sociology, which was slightly useless as he mostly took creative writing courses. He took too long to graduate, mostly due to his preoccupation with pursuing a career in amateur rodeo. Somewhere in his late twenties, he got tired of driving to and fro throughout the country catching steers, so he took a job teaching high school English in the International Baccalaureate program in Stockton, California, finding there his two loves: teaching and his wife, Liz, a fellow English teacher. B.H. holds a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska. It was there that Parnucklian for Chocolate, B.H.’s first novel, began to take shape. B.H. currently lives in Lodi, California with his wife, baby boy, and their cats Rooster and Mike Tyson.

Eric Morago is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet who believes performance carries as much importance on the page, as it does off. His work can be found in numerous print and on-line publications and anthologized in such collections as, Carving in Bone (Moon Tide Press, 2007), Beside the City of Angels (World Parade Books, 2010) and Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug (Tebot Bach, 2011). Currently Eric is an associate reviewer forPoetix.net, poet-in-residence with California Workforce Association, and teaches workshops for Red Hen Press’ Writing in School’s program. His first full-length collection of poetry and prose entitled, What We Ache For, is available from Moon Tide Press. Eric has also teamed with Melody Maker Productions to release I Don’t Like Straws, a studio produced spoken word album featuring music by David Gielan, which can be found on iTunes, Amazon and other music sites of the like. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach and writes to live in Whittier, CA where he is the poetry curator for Half Off Books and runs a quarterly reading series at Vinatero Wine Shop.

Red Hen at Poets House

March 16, 2013 @ 4 pm

Featuring:

Eloise Klein Healy is the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian authors. Red Hen Press will publish her seventh book of poetry, A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings, in March 2013.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven collections of poetry, including the new Come, Thief, published in August 2011, After (shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Financial Times), Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated four books containing the work of poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, and The Heart of Haiku, on Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011. She is also included in The Best Spiritual Writing of 2012 and The Best American Poetry 2011.

Dan Vera is a writer, editor and literary historian living in Washington, DC. He is the author of the poetry collection Speaking Wiri Wiri (Red Hen Press, 2013) inaugural winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books, 2008), and the editor of the gay culture journal White Crane. His poetry has appeared in various journals including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry, Delaware Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, Naugatuck River, the anthologies Divining Divas, Full Moon On K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, and DC Poets Against the War. He’s the co-creator of the literary history site, DC Writers’ Homes, and chairs the board of Split This Rock Poetry.

Red Hen at The Players Club

March 20, 2013

Featuring:

An AROHO event. Please check back to see who the readers will be!

Red Hen at Cornelia Street Café

March 21, 2013 @ 6 pm

Featuring:

John Barr’s poems have appeared in many magazines and have been published in eight collections, most recently The Adventures of Ibn Opcit, a two-volume mock epic published by Red Hen Press in 2013. His previous collections are: The War Zone (1989), Natural Wonders (1991), The Dial Painters (1994), Centennial Suite (1997), all by Warwick Press; The Hundred Fathom Curve (1997) and Grace (1999), by Story Line Press; and The Hundred Fathom Curve: New & Collected Poems (2011) by Red Hen Press. Barr has served on the boards of the Poetry Society of America, Yaddo, and Bennington College, the latter as chairman. He has taught in the graduate writing program of Sarah Lawrence College, and was appointed in 2004 the first president of The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. He lives in Chicago and New York.

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets (2009). His spoken word album Elegies & Laments, a “soundtrack” to Sixty Sonnets recorded with rock band and orchestra, was issued by Pub Can Records in 2012. He supplies libretti and song texts for contemporary composers Stella Sung, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Christopher LaRosa. He also writes scripts and appears in short films for the post-punk conceptual band Mercury Radio Theater. His poems have appeared in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2011), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He hosts the popular blog www.everseradio.com and works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.

Mary Johnson is author of the memoir An Unquenchable Thirst, named one of 2011′s best books by Kirkus Review. Her need for support while writing was the catalyst for the founding of A Room of Her Own Foundation. Johnson is AROHO’s Creative Director of Retreats, and is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. Her work has been widely published, including in The Washington Post, O the Oprah Magazine, Poets & Writers, Bloomberg View, Feminism and Religion, Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and NPR.

Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of Red Hen Press’s 2011 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, and Drunken Boat, among other journals. Brynn was born in the Central Valley of California to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. She received an MFA in creative writing from SarahLawrenceCollege and an MA in religious studies from NYU. Currently, Brynn lives in the Bay Area and teaches in San Francisco.

For more information regarding these events, please email publicity@redhen.org