Verlaine

May 17: A Celebration of Kundiman at Verlaine

May 17: A Celebration of Kundiman at Verlaine with Aziza Barnes, Cornelius Eady, Shonni Enelow, Rigoberto González, Monica Sok, Christopher Soto, & Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

Join us for a blowout CELEBRATION OF VERLAINE: a cross-cultural, cross-generational poetry carousal featuring:

AZIZA BARNES, CORNELIUS EADY, RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, MONICA SOK, CHRISTOPHER SOTO, & KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI 

Sunday, May 17
Verlaine Bar & Lounge

110 Rivington St, New York, NY

Happy hour: 4-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation


BIOS:

AZIZA BARNES is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Bedstuy, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published from Button Poetry. You can find her work in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, and other journals. She is a poetry & non-fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow and graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of The Dance Cartel & the divine fabrics collective. She loves a good suit & anything to do with Motown. 
 

CORNELIUS EADY is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Putnam, April 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985; in 2001 Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. His play, “Brutal Imagination,” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002. In 1996 Eady co-founded, with writer Toi Derricotte, the Cave Canem summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. More than a decade later, Cave Canem is a thriving national network of black poets, as well as an institution offering regional workshops, readings, a first book prize, and the summer retreat.

 

SHONNI ENELOW writes for and about theater and performance. She is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University. Her latest work of theater, The Power of Emotion, premiered this January in the Public Theatre's Under the Radar Festival Incoming Series. Her performance lecture, "My Dinner with Bernard Frechtman," was recently published in Aufgabe. Her critical monograph, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. 

 

RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is the author 15 books, most recently the poetry collection Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, he is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships; a NYFA grant in poetry; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Poetry Center Book Award; the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award; and the 2015 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle.
 

MONICA SOK is a Cambodian poet from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Currently, she is completing an MFA in poetry at New York University. A Kundiman fellow, her poems are forthcoming in Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
 

CHRISTOPHER SOTO (aka LOMA) is a queer latin@ punk poet and prison abolitionist. They are currently curating Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with The Lambda Literary Foundation. They have work published in Columbia: A Journal , MiPOesias, Apogee Journal and more. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and the 2014-2015 Intern at Poetry Society of America.
 

KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI is an award-winning spoken word poet, playwright, and filmmaker whose work has been featured at over 600 venues worldwide including the White House, Apollo Theater in Harlem, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, BAM, Tyra Banks’ Flawsome Ball, & three seasons of “HBO Def Poetry.” Award recipient of the Illinois Arts Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian Women Giving Circle, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Kelly has been profiled on Idealist in NYC’s Top 40 NYC’ers Who Make Positive Social Change, AngryAsianMan.com’s “30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30,” and HBO’s “East of Main Street: Asians Aloud.”


Get there early for drinks, seats, and chat!

November 16: Kundiman & Verlaine ft. Jay Deshpande, Sandra Lim, & Jee Leong Koh w/ translator Keisuke Tsubono

Kundiman & Verlaine ft. Jay Deshpande, Sandra Lim, & Jee Leong Koh w/ translator Keisuke Tsubono

Join us for a night of words & libation with readings by:

JAY DESHPANDE, SANDRA LIM, & JEE LEONG KOH w/ translator KEISUKE TSUBONO 

Open bar: 4-5pm
Open mic: 4:30-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation

RSVP on Facebook!

** This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York State Council of the Arts in partnership with the City Council with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. *


Jay Deshpande’s poems have appeared in Narrative, Sixth Finch, Atlas Review, Handsome, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. He is the author of Love the Stranger, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2015. He has studied poetry at Columbia University and served as poetry editor of AGNI. He lives in Brooklyn. You can find him @jdeshpan and at jaydeshpande.com.

 

Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and educated at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.

 
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Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems, including Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). His latest collection The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press) has been translated into Japanese by Keisuke Tsubono, and published in an illustrated bilingual edition by Awai Books. It is shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize. Jee is the co-chair of the inaugural Singapore Literature Festival in NYC, and the curator of the arts website Singapore Poetry (http://singaporepoetry.com/). He has a new book of poems forthcoming from Carcanet Press (UK) in July 2015. 

 
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Keisuke Tsubono is a translator, writer, editor, and scholar of American literature. He is also a co-founder of Awai Books, Ph.D student in contemporary literary studies at the University of Tokyo, and Fulbright visiting student researcher at New York University (2014-2015).


September 8: Kundiman & Verlaine Reading featuring Nina Sharma, Sho Sugita & Jenny Xie

September 8

Kundiman & Verlaine Reading

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Open Bar from 4-5 pm
Open Mic from 4:30-5pm
Featured reading begins at 5 pm
$5 donation

Verlaine
110 Rivington St.
(Ludlow & Essex Sts.)
212-614-2494
F train to Delancey

Nina Sharma, Sho Sugita, & Jenny Xie read. 

Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1409893549226010/ 

Nina Sharma is a writer from Edison, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in Certain Circuits Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, and Ginosko Literary Journal. She recently was awarded a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her nonfiction. With Quincy Scott Jones, she co-created the Noreaster Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. She is currently attending Columbia University's MFA in writing program and working on her first book. 

Sho Sugita lives in Brooklyn, NY. He works as a medical manuscript translator and studies poetry at Brooklyn College. He was an invited musician/reader in 2012 for Les Souffleurs de Vers: deuxième edition in Grenoble, France to raise funds for the 3-11 Tohoku disaster. His creative work can be found in Washington Square and Endless
Possibilities
(Classical and New Music on WRSU). He is currently working on a translation manuscript of Hirato Renkichi and Kanbara Tai, two poets active during the Japanese Futurist Movement of the early 1920s.

Jenny Xie received her MFA from NYU, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, Narrative, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She's currently a lecturer in the expository writing program at NYU.

 

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

 

 
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