Poetry Reading
November 14th at 8:00PM
Poet, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His collections of poems include: Disappearing Acts [Chax Press 2014], Afterimage [Chax Press 2006], Savoir-fear [Spuyten Duyvil Press 2003], Alpha Ruins [Bucknell University Press 2000], selected by Fanny Howe as a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award., and “Dead Ringer” forthcoming from Blaze Vox Press. His poems have appeared in 5 anthologies including: An Avec Sampler #2 [Avec Press 1998], Primary Trouble [Talisman House 1996], Writing From The New Coast: Presentation and Technique [o.blek Press 12, 1993]. His essays on contemporary poetics have appeared in two books published by the University of Alabama Press: Telling it Slant [2000] and We Who Love to Be Astonished [2002]. His work has appeared in numerous journals including: American Letters and Commentary, Avec, Big Bridge, Eoagh, First Intensity, Five Fingers, Jacket, New American Writing, o.blek, Ribot, Second Avenue Poetry, Skanky Possum, Talisman, Van Gogh’s Ear, Verse, and The World. He curated poetry readings for the Segue Foundation in NYC for 15 years. He translated New Exercises by Franck André Jamme [Wave Press 2008]. His plays have been presented in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hartford, and Paris and have been published in Mouth of Shadows [Spuyten Duyvil 2000], The Sound of Fear Clapping [Obscure Press 2003], and Present Tense [Stage This 3, 2009]. His two radio plays The Sound of Fear Clapping and Foreign Bodies were produced for NPR [www.pennsound]. He is the recipient of a Drama-logue Award and the former editor of Theater:Ex [1986-1988], an experimental theater publication. His recent NY Productions include: Present Tense [Alchemical Theater Lab 2013], Barely There, Flipper [Harvest Works 2013], and Foreign Bodies [Center for Performance Research 2014]. He is the author of three feature-length screenplays. He lives in New York City and has taught at Touro College and Hofstra University.
Sharon Mesmer is a poet, prose writer and essayist. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). Her newest poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place, has just been published by Bloof Books. Four of her flarf poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). Other anthology appearances include I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (Les Figues, 2012), Poems for the Nation: Edited by Allen Ginsberg (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999). Mesmer performs her work widely: most recently at the 2015 Brussels International Poetry Festival; previously, at the Iceland Wave Festival in Reykjavik in 2010, the Ovidius Festival at Neptun Beach, Romania in 2009, and as part of a tour of three Japanese cities, sponsored by Tokyo-based American Book Jam magazine, in 1997. As an original member of the flarf collective, she performed with three other flarf poets at the Whitney Museum in the 2007 “Flarf Versus Conceptual” event, and at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis in 2008. She was also featured on National Public Radio’s “Studio 360” program on flarf, hosted by Sean Cole, on January 23, 2009. Her poetry, fiction, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, the Wall Street Journal, New American Writing, the Evergreen Review, glittermob, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her awards include a Fulbright Specialist grant (2011), an Alumna of the Year Award from Columbia College Chicago (2009), a Jerome Foundation/SASE award (as mentor to poet Elisabeth Workman, 2009) and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships (2007 and 1999). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She blogs at https://dubiouslabia.wordpress.com/.