press release
56 Bogart Street Brooklyn NY 11206
Poetry Reading: September 20, 7-9 P.M.
Brooklyn Poets Reading Series: Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event
http://brooklynpoets.org
The Brooklyn Poets Reading Series returns as a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event on Friday, September 20, at 7 PM at Studio10, featuring Natalie Diaz, Rachel Eliza Griffiths and Cornelius Eady, as well as music by Eady's band Rough Magic. Admission is free. Wine, beer and light refreshments will be served.
Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She has been awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency and the 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012 by Copper Canyon Press. The winner of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010), The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011) and Mule & Pear (New Issues, 2011), which was awarded the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Librarian Association. A recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center, her visual and literary work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, Indiana Review, Mosaic, Folio, Transition,American Poet and elsewhere. Griffiths’s newest collection, Lighting the Shadow, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.
Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2008), nominated for an NAACP Image Award; Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Award; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon, 1991), nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Press, 1986), winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets. With Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem. Eady’s Running Man was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and awarded a 1999 Obie for best musical score/lead actor in a musical, and his Brutal Imagination won the 2002 Oppenheimer award for the best first play by an American Playwright. He is Professor of English and the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
This reading is presented is in association with the exhibition “Do Not Blow Horn Ring Bell” an exhibition of recent work by Tim Spelios on display at Studio10 until October 6, 2013.
For more information please contact Annelie McGavin at (718) 213-2469.
Gallery hours: Thursday through Sunday 1 - 6 pm or by appointment
Contact: studio10bogart@gmail.com (718) 852-4396 www.studio10bogart.com
The gallery is across the street from the Bogart Street exit at the L Train Morgan stop