Wednesday December 15th, 8 pm: Claire Hero, Becca Klaver, Julia Story

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Read excerpts from Brian’s work here and here.

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Joshua Harmon is the author of Scape (poems, 2009) and Quinnehtukqut (a novel, 2007), and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Poems from his current project, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, are published or forthcoming in Absent, Agni, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, The Offending Adam, Sentence, Typo, and Volt, as well as in the chapbook The Poughkeepsiad (Greying Ghost Press, August 2010).  He no longer lives in Poughkeepsie.

Read excerpts from Josh’s work here, here, and here.

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Read some of Emily’s work here, here, and here.

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Read excerpts from Amina’s work here and here.

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Read some of Jen’s work here, here, and here.

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Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow (Persea Books), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Green Mountains Review, and New American Writing. She has also been featured in Poetry Daily and From the Fishouse. Her extended poetry project can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/anneshaw.

Read excerpts from Anne’s work on her website.

Small Animal Project teams up with Artifice Magazine to celebrate the launch of Issue #1 at Outpost 186 on Saturday, 2/27. 3 pm, small donation suggested. Readers will include Ori Fienberg, William Walsh, Elisa Gabbert & Jessica Bozek.

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Ori Fienberg is a Writing Center Coordinator for WriteBoston, an organization working to improve the writing of students in the Boston public high schools.  He’s had work published in Diagram, Subtropics, and The Cincinnati Review, to name a few.  He has work forthcoming in Pank Online and Artifice.

Read some of Ori’s work here and here.

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Read excerpts from Elisa’s work here and here.

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Read some of William’s work here and here.

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Jessica Bozek is the author of The Bodyfeel Lexicon (Switchback Books) and several chapbooks. Recent poems appear in Action, Yes, Artifice, Fairy Tale Review, P-QUEUE, and Womb. Jessica runs Small Animal Project.

Read excerpts from Jessica’s work here and here.

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Read excerpts from Jack’s work here, here, and here.

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Read some of Cheryl’’s work here, here, and here.

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Zach Savich’s first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the Iowa Poetry
Prize. He has had recent poems in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly,
Kenyon Review, and the anthology Best New Poets 2008.

Read excerpts from Zach’s work here, here, and here.

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Read excerpts from Lily’s work here, here, and here.

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Read some of Andrew’s work here.

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Joshua Marie Wilkinson hails from Seattle.  He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo, 2009). Two new projects are due out in 2010: Selenography (Sidebrow), a book-length collaboration with the Polaroids of Califone’s Tim Rutili and Poets on Teaching, an anthology featuring short essays by 101 poets (Iowa). He lives in Chicago and Athens, Georgia.

Read excerpts from Joshua’s work here and here.

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Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times: Stories. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Guernica, Fence, and The Believer, where he served as an editor from 2004-2007.

Read excerpts from Matthew’s work here, here, and here.

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Kristen Iskandrian’s work has been published in Gulf Coast, American Letters & Commentary, Memorious, Denver Quarterly, La Petite Zine, Action Yes, and other journals. She received her PhD in English from University of Georgia, where currently she is an instructor of composition and creative writing. With her husband, daughter, and cantankerous cat, she lives outside of Athens in a funny little house.

Read an excerpt from Kristen’s work.

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John Dermot Woods lives with his family in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of The Complete Collection of people, places & things (BlazeVOX). His comic chapbook, The Remains, is forthcoming from Doublecross Press. He edits the arts quarterly Action,Yes and organizes the online reading series Apostrophe Cast.

Read an excerpt from John’s work.

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David Blair grew up in Pittsburgh. His first book Ascension Days was chosen by Thomas Lux for the 2006 Del Sol Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the anthologies The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Zoland Poetry, Boston Review, Fourth River, Fulcrum, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, The Hat, Ploughshares, and Verse. He’s an associate professor at The New England Institute of Art, and he lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Read an excerpt from David’s work.

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David Rivard is the author of four books: Sugartown (Graywolf, 2006),  Bewitched Playground (Graywolf, 2000), Wise Poison (Graywolf, 1996), the winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1996 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque ( Pitt, 1988), winner of the Starrett Poetry Prize.  Among his other awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Arts Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry.  He lives in Cambridge with his wife and teenage daughter, and teaches in the MFA program in writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Read an excerpt from David’s work.

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Sam Witt is the author of two poetry collections, Everlasting Quail (UPNE, 2001), winner of the Katherine Nason Bakeless Prize, and Sunflower Brother (Cleveland State University Press, 2006). He has taught at Harvard University, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and at Whitman College. Witt is currently looking for a publisher for his new manuscript, “Occupation: Dreamland,” while freelancing and living in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Read an excerpt from Sam’s work, below:

FROM THE APHASIA WARD

The sea is approaching. Ghostcrabs approach
on whispering feet, a tumbleweed of newspaper.
The woman approaches, holding her empty camera.
Now. I will not try to say these syllables:
When you first stumbled across this small heap of decay,
black feather, hollow bone, these small dead, the birds,
it must have looked like a sweater for a small child,
or a black bra the sea had washed up in.
I was sleeping, as they say, under the wing.
Unlike these dead birds, fresh from their migration cycle,
I came preforgotten, like a photograph of a dirty beach.
They perfume my loss. They fall out of the sky into the ocean, etc.
They make me want to shed my triploid human gene:
All flesh is black grass, therefore: All flesh
goes the way of flight when it evaporates.
You could almost hear the sea’s ceaseless mathematics
from the aphasia ward, like a xerox of disappeared honeybees,
put together out of the small sounds she made in her sleep.
The sea turns over its dead. The sea delivers us.
The sea persists in washing its white hands of me, at noon.
The sea conjugates these dead
at the cost of a young woman’s form, because already
the body has spilled its liquid shadow like ink, at noon,
like a photographer’s black hood thrown down over the birds.
The sea negates the sky like manna, because living
it’s something like swallowing jewels, isn’t it? Like manna
the birds fall out of the heavens & they eat you
with their small black eyes. We take the light with us,
therefore, flight & decay, thus,
the starched hospital beds are filled. Thus,
from the beachfront hospital, a girl with no hair
watched a small speck fall out of the sky.
Let me tell you how the wind in the leaves
of the Eucalyptus tree outside moved her lips.
She made a wish behind her powerful head
& slept.

Noy Holland is the author of two collections of short fiction, What Begins With Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf), and the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, Open City, New York Tyrant, Denver Quarterly, NOON, and others. She is a Professor in the MFA program for Writers and Poets at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she co-directs the Juniper Initiative.

Read an excerpt from Noy’s work.

Kate Schapira lives in Providence, where she writes, teaches, and runs the Publicly Complex reading series. In addition to making her own chapbooks, she’s the author of four chapbooks published by other people, including The Love of Freak Millways and Tango Wax (Cy Gist Press) and two mini-chaps from Rope-A-Dope Press. She just started working with first graders as a Writer in the Schools.

Read an excerpt from Kate’s work.