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)

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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)

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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.

Suzanne Gardinier, Antony Rowland, & Jeremy Voigt

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Suzanne Gardinier, Antony Rowland, & Jeremy Voigt



Thursday, 7 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 our upcoming Chin Music reading featuring three fine poets: Suzanne Gardinier, Antony Rowland, & Jeremy Voigt. 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

SG is the author of five books, most recently Iridium & Selected Poems. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

Antony Rowland published his first collection of poetry, The Land of Green Ginger, with Salt Press (UK) in 2008. Since then his work has been included in the Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade: New British And Irish Poets (2010), and he was invited to record for the national Poetry Archive in 2009 (www.poetryarchive.org.) His writing has also appeared in a Carcanet anthology (New Poetries III (2003)), as well as journals such as PN Review, Critical Quarterly and the Cincinnati Review.

Jeremy Voigt's work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, Washington Square, REED Magazine, Talking River Review, Poet Lore, and RHINO. His chapbook Neither Rising nor Falling was published by Finishing Line Press in fall 2009. He has been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, and teaches regularly at the Port Townsend Writer's Conference, Whatcom Community College, and Burlington-Edison High School.

Mark Doty, Nicky Beer, & Metta Sáma

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Mark Doty, Nicky Beer, & Metta Sáma

Thursday, 17 March 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: Mark Doty, Nicky Beer, & Metta Sáma. 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

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections. Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Doty lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island.

Nicky Beer is the author of The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010). She has received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Discovery/The Nation award, and a Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel. Learn more at www.nickybeer.com.

Metta Sáma is a fiction editor, book reviewer, poet, fiction writer, educator, administrator, & amateur painter and photographer. Her poems and reviews can be found or are upcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, Vinyl, The Drunken Boat, Drunken Boat, her circle, among others. Her first poetry collection, South of Here (New Issues 2005), was published under her given name, Lydia Melvin.

Joshua Beckman, Eric Gamalinda, & Sara Femenella

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Joshua Beckman, Eric Gamalinda, & Sara Femenella



Thursday, 3 March 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: Joshua Beckman, Eric Gamalinda, and Sara Femenella. 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

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of seven books, including Take It (Wave Books, 2009), Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including 5 Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat and Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

Eric Gamalinda has published two books of poetry in the U.S., one of which, Zero Gravity, won the Alice James Books New York/New England Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. He was born and raised in the Philippines, where he published numerous books of fiction and a collection of poetry and was awarded the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize for a novel. In 2009, he was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. A book of short stories, People Are Strange, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in fall 2011. He is also a playwright and experimental filmmaker; his three-act play, Resurrection, was staged off-Broadway in New York in 2010, and he has received the Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Awards. He was publications director of the Asian American Writers Workshop until 1997, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii in Manoa in 1999, and Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Asia Pacific American Studies Program in 2002-03. He currently works for the New York Philharmonic and teaches at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

Sara Femenella's work had been published or is forthcoming in The Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Dossier, The Normal School and The Saint Ann's Review. She received her MFA from Columbia University and works at Poets & Writers Magazine.

Tolstoy Centennial with Polina Barskova, Ilya Kaminsky, and Boris Dralyuk

Chin Music

The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Polina Barskova, Ilya Kaminsky, and Boris Dralyuk

Thursday, 10 February 2010 @ 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 Tolstoy Centennial celebration featuring bilingual readings of poetry and a staged reading in Russian from Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does A Man Need, the inaugural title from Calypso Editions. Featuring Polina Barskova, Ilya Kaminsky, and Boris Dralyuk. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller. Special thanks to Melville House.

Calypso Editions is a 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

Polina Barskova, born in 1976, is widely regarded as the most important Russian poet of her generation. Her first book of poems was published when she was still a teenager. After receiving a degree in Russian Literature and Classics from St. Petersburg University, she came to the US where she earned a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from UC Berkeley. Author of seven books of poetry, The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems is her first collection in English. Barskova teaches at Hampshire College.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993 when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and was named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. In 2009, poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry's Levinson Prize. Harper Collins published his anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, in 2010. Kaminsky is the Director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute and lives in San Diego, California, with his beautiful wife, Katie Farris.

Boris Dralyuk is completing his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of literary and academic journals, including Poetry International, Zeek, Slavic and East European Journal, and Russian History. He and David Stromberg have recently translated and edited Polina Barskova’s The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011).