April 30th 2011 – 8PM
Martha King was born in Virginia in 1937. She attended Black Mountain College in the summer of 1955 and married Basil King in 1958. She began writing in the late 1960s, after the birth of their two daughters, Mallory and Hetty.
Living in Brooklyn since 1968, King produced 31 issues of Giants Play Well in the Drizzle (sent free to interested readers), worked as an editor in mainstream book publishing, then for Poets & Writers, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and currently the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Her books include North & South (2007), a collection of short stories, Separate Parts (2002), and Little Tales of Family and War (1999). Other stories have been anthologized in Fiction from the Rail and The Wreckage of Reason. Currently, King is at work on a memoir, Outside Inside, chapters of which have appeared in Jacket #40 online, Bombay Gin, and New York Stories.
Basil King Biography
Basil King is a painter/poet, born in England before World War II and living in Brooklyn since 1968. He attended Black Mountain College as a teenager and completed an apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist in San Francisco and New York. For the past three decades he has taken his art from the abstract to the figure, from the figure to the abstract.
He began to write in the 1980 and now practices both arts daily. His books include mirage: a poem in 22 sections, Warp Spasm, Identity, and 77 Beasts/Basil King Beastiary. Recent chapbooks include In the Fields Where Daffodils Grow, from Libellum in 2009, and Wild Cards, from Cy Gist in 2010. Both are excerpts from his on-gong work Learning to Draw.
An exhibition of his paintings, Portraits of The Green Man, was presented at Poets House, February-June 2010.