Marilyn Nelson, Ross Gay, & James Best

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Marilyn Nelson, Ross Gay, & James Best



Thursday, 2 June 2011 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY (between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us for our upcoming Chin Music season finale featuring three fine poets: Marilyn Nelson, Ross Gay, & James Best. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED POETS

Poet Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of fourteen books and five chapbooks. Her book The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award. The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems won the 1998 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. Carver: A Life In Poems won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Fortune’s Bones was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Her young adult book, A Wreath For Emmett Till, won the 2005 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and was a 2006 Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a 2006 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a 2006 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book. Nelson is a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut; was (2004-2010) founder/director and host of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small non-profit writers' colony; and held the office of Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Ross Gay’s books of poems include Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, January 2011). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, MARGIE, Ploughshares and many other magazines. He has also, with the artist Kimberly Thomas, collaborated on several artists’ books: The Cold Loop, BRN2HNT and The Bullet. He is an editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue, whose recently published books include Chromosomory by Layli Long Soldier, Amigos by Matthew Dickman, Ad Hoc by Chris Mattingly, and Dolly by Kimberly Thomas and Simone White. Ross Gay is also on the board of directors of the Bloomington Community Orchard.

James Best lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, Valerie, and their terminally ill bonsai, Moonlight Graham. Besides poetry, he writes for television and humor websites. He has poems published or forthcoming in RATTLE, Cold Mountain Review, South Carolina Review, decomP Magazine, Limestone and the anthology, Fire in the Pasture, due out this summer. Also this summer you can see a poem of his on a girl's t-shirt at American Eagle. He knows this calculated maneuver into mainstream fashion will bring him the large audience of tweens every poet craves.

Meena Alexander, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, & Nicole Sealey

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Meena Alexander, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, & Nicole Sealey



Thursday, 19 May 2011 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY (between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us for our upcoming Chin Music reading featuring three fine poets: Meena Alexander, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, & Nicole Sealey. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED POETS

Meena Alexander is considered one of the foremost Indian poets of her generation. She has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems. Her memoir Fault Lines was picked as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the year. Poetics of Dislocation appeared in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. Her prose includes two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music. Her awards include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Arts Council of England. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York, teaching in the MFA program at Hunter College and the Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of two collections of poetry, Wild Greens (2002), a Red Hen first book award finalist, and Passion Maps (2009). She has had chapbooks and essays published in a variety of venues including Hotel Amerika, WLT (World Literature Today), Prairie Schooner, and Room magazine where she won the 2009 creative non-fiction prize for "April the Cruelest". She is on the faculty of Hellenic American University in Athens, Greece, and is on the adjunct faculty in the Creative Writing Program at NYU. She is currently involved in research that connects Sylvia Plath's poetry to Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy.

Nicole Sealey, born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Central Florida, is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and Hedgebrook alumna. A finalist for the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming to Callaloo, Harvard Review, The Los Angeles Review and Third Coast, among others.

James Richardson, Will Hubbard, & Sally Wen Mao

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring James Richardson, Will Hubbard, & Sally Wen Mao



Thursday, 5 May 2011 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY (between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us for our upcoming Chin Music reading featuring three fine poets: James Richardson, Will Hubbard, & Sally Wen Mao. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED POETS

James Richardson is the recipient of the 2011 Jackson Poetry Prize. His most recent books are By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays. His work appears in The New Yorker, Slate, Paris Review, Yale Review, Great American Prose Poems, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, The Pushcart Prize anthology and several recent volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Will Hubbard grew up in North Carolina and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. His first book, Cursivism, will be released in May 2011 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Sally Wen Mao is an 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar and a Kundiman fellow. Her work can be found published or forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, and West Branch, among others. Born in Wuhan, China, she has lived in Boston, the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, Amsterdam, and most recently Ithaca, where she is an MFA candidate at Cornell University.

Edward Hirsch, Matthew Zapruder, & Piotr Florczyk

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Edward Hirsch, Matthew Zapruder, & Piotr Florczyk



Thursday, 21 April 2011 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY (between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us for a special Chin Music celebration to launch the second title from Calypso Editions, Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir, with a reading featuring three fine poets: Edward Hirsch, Matthew Zapruder, & Piotr Florczyk. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller.

Calypso Editions is an artist-run, cooperative press dedicated to publishing quality literary books of poetry and fiction with a global perspective. Our only criteria is excellence.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED POETS

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has recently published The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, which brings together thirty-five years of poetry from seven previous collections, including For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), and Special Orders (2008). He has also written four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, and Poet’s Choice (2006). He edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press). He has edited Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-edited The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years and now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon). Currently he works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. He lives in San Francisco.

Piotr Florczyk is an American poet and a translator from his native Polish. With Been and Gone (Marick Press, 2009), he introduced the English-speaking audience to Julian Kornhauser (1946-), one of the foremost Polish poets of the Generation of '68. He is also the translator of a collection of poems by Anna Swir (1909-84), Building the Barricade and Other Poems (Calypso Editions, 2011). He is the recipient of the 2007 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators, holds an MFA from San Diego State University, and has taught at the University of Delaware. Florczyk's work has appeared in Slate, Boston Review, America Magazine, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, The Southern Review, West Branch, World Literature Today, and a variety of other journals.