Reading in Toronto ACROSS no. 1: Gary Barwin, Tom Cho, Beatriz Hausner, Kaie Kellough, Hoa Nguyen
Friday, May 9, 20147:30-10:00pm
St Stephen in-the-Fields Church
103 Bellevue Ave, Toronto (at College Street)
ACROSS is a new reading performance series in Toronto that reaches from poetry communities outward to other genres and art forms, and proposes more intermingling of audiences, performance modes, creative positions and social identities. Each evening presents four to six invited writers and artists whose work also enacts a poetics of reach. In particular, the series hopes to create some flux and simmer among writers, musicians, and intermedia artists interested in ideas of improvisation, site-specific performance, interdisciplinary form and collaboration. Readers are invited to explore new ways of opening up their work to the space and the audience. Each evening will propose some form of sonic/choral interaction. ACROSS is curated by Margaret Christakos and is co-presented by St Stephen in-the-Fields church, and its priest Maggie Helwig. $5-$10 at the door sliding scale.wheelchair accessible.books and snacks.
For more information: mchristakos@hotmail.com
GARY BARWIN is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of 17 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for both teens and children. His work has been widely performed and published both nationally and internationally. His latest book is Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press, 2014) and he has recently completed a novel, Yiddish for Pirates. Earlier poetry collections include The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House, 2010), and collaborations Franzlations (with Craig Conley and Hugh Thomas, New Star, 2011), fragments from the frag pool (with derek beaulieu, Mercury, 2005) and The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts, BookThug, 2011). Gary Barwin will be Writer-in-Residence at Western University in 2014-2015. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com. For one crazy summer, Barwin shared a shoe-size with Allen Ginsberg.TOM CHO is an artist and the author of the collection of fictions Look Who’s Morphing, published to acclaim in Australia and New Zealand by Giramondo in 2009. In April 2014, it was published in North America and Europe by Arsenal Pulp Press. An important contribution to trans literature, Look Who’s Morphing has been shortlisted for various awards, including the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (South East Asia and Pacific). His fiction pieces have appeared widely, including in such publications as The Best Australian Stories series, Asia Literary Review and The New Quarterly. He has also performed his work on the stages of many festivals, from Singapore Writers Festival to Sydney Mardi Gras. Born and raised in Australia, Tom has applied for permanent residency in Canada. He has a PhD in Professional Writing and is currently writing a novel about the meaning of life. His website is at tomcho.com.
BEATRIZ HAUSNER’s poetry books include The Wardrobe Mistress (2003), Sew Him Up (2010), Enter the Raccoon (2012), La costurera y el muñeco viviente / The Seamstress and the Living Doll (selected poems in Spanish translation by Julio César Aguilar, 2012). La Couturière et l’homme-poupée, in French translation by Patricia Godbout and Héloïse Duhaime, has just been published by Les Éditions de la Grenouillère. She has also published numerous chapbooks including The Stitched Heart (2004), and The Archival Stone (2005). De ideale man gedichten (2010) is the Dutch translation by Laurens Vancrevel of her chapbook Towards the Ideal Man Poems(2003). Beatriz Hausner is also the translator of many works of literature, principally from Spanish into English, including the poetry of César Moro, Rosamel del Valle, Mandrágora, Olga Orozco, Enrique Molina, Abigael Bohórquez, the prose of Alvaro Mutis and Aldo Pellegrini, and other writers associated with international surrealism. Hausner is a respected editor and was one of the publishers of Quattro Books. She lives in Toronto where she works as a public librarian.
KAIE KELLOUGH is a word-sound systemizer. his systems originate in the inchoate swirl of vowels, consonants, misspellings, shapes, stammerings, and emerge as audio recordings, books, visual entities, volumes of letters, and performances that verse and reverse utterance. kaie's work fuses formal experiment and social engagement. kaie is the author of 2 books of poetry, lettricity (cumulus, 2004) and maple leaf rag(arbeiter ring, 2010), a visual print bookwork with no press entitled erasures diasporas, and 2 sound recordings. he has performed and published internationally. kaie lives in montréal, where he works on new and old ideas.kaie.ca
HOA NGUYEN was born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the DC area. She studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco where she earned an MFA. She is the author of three collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks including As Long As Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012), Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009) and Your Ancient See Through (Subpress, 2002). Her poetry has been collected in eight anthologies including The Best of Fence (2009) and Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry(Milkweed Editions, 2008). With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, Texas, their home for 14 years. She lives in Toronto where she teaches private workshops and curates a reading series. Wave Books will release Red Juice, a gathering of her early uncollected poems in September 2014. https://www.facebook.com/events/543334432453259/