Thursday, December 6, 2018

December 6, 2018 (Bill of Rights Day Reading)

Bill of Rights Day Reading
A Benefit for the ACLU
December 6, 2018

Curated by Joan Bauer and Emily Mohn-Slate 
Hosted by the White Whale Bookstore

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From L-R: Cameron Barnett, Emily Mohn-Slate, Sheila Carter-Jones, Mike Schneider, Justin Vicari, Arlene Weiner, Don Wentworth, Celeste Gainey, Joy Katz, Adriana Ramirez, Malcolm Friend, Joan Bauer & Jan Hamilton

Emily Mohn-Slate Introduction

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Joan Bauer Introduction
 
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Cameron Barnett holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge, and co-coordinator of Pitt’s Speakeasy Reading Series. He teaches middle school at Falk Laboratory School, and serves as an editor of Pittsburgh Poetry Journal and a board member of The Bridge Series. His work has been nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 82nd Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize. His first collection, The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water (Autumn House Press, 2018), was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.  

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Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep selected by Elizabeth Alexander as the 2012 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award and the chapbook Blackberry Cobbler Song. Her chapbook Crooked Star Dreambook was named Honorable Mention for the 2013 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Contest. Sheila is a fellow of Cave Canem, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the 2015 Sewanee Writers' Conference. She has been described by Herbert Woodward Martin as one who writes with "immediacy of tone, voice and language."  

Sheila Carter-Jones - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download 

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017), and has received awards and fellowships from organizations including CantoMundo, VONA/Voices of Our Nations, Backbone Press, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, and the University of Memphis. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including La Respuesta magazine, Vinyl, Word Riot, The Acentos Review, and Pretty Owl Poetry. His first full-length book of poetry, Our Brusies Kept Singing Purple, the winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize, was published by the Inlandia Institute in 2018. 

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Celeste Gainey is the author of the full-length poetry collection, the GAFFER (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2015), and the chapbook In the land of speculation & seismography (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize. The first woman to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) as a gaffer, she has spent many years working with light in film and architecture. www.celestegainey.com 

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Joy Katz has three books of poems; her manuscript in progress, White: An Abstract, documents every minute of whiteness in her life. Her honors include a Stegner fellowship and grants from the NEA, the Heinz Foundation, the Barbara Deming Fund, and Dickinson House in Belgium. She is also a social practice artist, collaborating with musicians, theater practitioners, and choreographers in the pro-beauty, anti-racist art collective IfYouReallyLoveMe. She teachers in Carlow’s Madwomen in the Attic workshops for women and is an editor-at-large for Copper Nickel.  

Joy Katz - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download  

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian nonfiction writer, storyteller, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She’s the winner of the 2015 PEN/Fusion Emerging Writer’s Prize, for her nonfiction novella, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). In 2016, she was named “Critic At Large” by the Los Angeles Times’ Book Section.  Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary HubGuernica/ PEN America, ConvolutionHEArt, Apogee, and Nerve.com. She is the author of two small-press poetry books—The Swallows (Blue Sketch Press, reissued 2016) and Trusting in Imaginary Spaces (Tired Hearts Press, 2010)—as well as the nonfiction editor of DISMANTLE (Thread Makes Blanket Press, 2014). Ramírez co-founded Aster(ix) Journal in 2013 with novelist Angie Cruz.  Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she co-founded the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective (home of the Steel City Slam) and the infamous Nasty Slam. She was featured in the 2014 Legends of Poetry Slam Showcase and TEDxHouston, as well as the 2016 Three Rivers Arts Festival. Her debut full-length nonfiction book, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner (2018). 

Adriana Ramirez - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download 

Mike Schneider has published in many journals, including Notre Dame Review, New Ohio Review and Poetry. In 2012 he received The Florida Review Editors Award in Poetry. In 2017 he won the Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press, which published his second chapbook, How Many Faces Do You Have? 

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Justin Vicari is a poet, cultural critic, and translator. His first collection of poems, The Professional Weepers (Pavement Saw, 2011), won the Transcontinental Award. He is the author of a new collection, In Search of Lost Joy (Main Street Rag, 2018). He has also published monographs on filmmakers Gus Van Sant and Nicolas Winding Refn. 

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Arlene Weiner is the author of two poetry collections: City Bird (Ragged Sky, 2016) and Escape Velocity (Ragged Sky, 2006), of which Poet Joy Katz wrote, “I want to keep my favorite of these beautifully alert, surprising poems with me as I grow old.” A MacDowell Colony fellow in 2008, Arlene has been a Shakespeare scholar, a cardiology technician, a college instructor, an editor, and a research associate in educational applications of cognitive science. Her poetry has been published in journals including Off the CoastPleiadesPoet Lore, and U.S. 1 Worksheets, anthologized, and read by Garrison Keillor on his Writer’s Almanac. She also writes plays. Her play Findings was produced by Pittsburgh Playwrights Company in March 2017. 

Arlene Weiner - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download 

Don Wentworth's work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in everyday life.  His poetry has appeared in Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, Frogpond, and Rolling Stone, as well as a number of anthologies.  He is the author of three poetry collections from Six Gallery Press: Past All Traps (2011), Yield to the Willow (2014), and With a Deepening Presence (2016).  Don has two new poetry books forthcoming: a collection of ghazals from Low Ghost and a collaborative collection of tanka written with the British haiku poet, Joy McCall. 

Don Wentworth - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download 

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