A Poetry Study Break with CA Conrad & Debrah Morkun

A POETRY STUDY BREAK with

CA CONRAD & DEBRAH MORKUN

Thursday April 26^th, 4 pm- 5:30 pm

501 Cathedral of Learning

(Coffee, tea, & cupcakes provided)

CA Conrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers on the side of the highway for his teen mother and helping her shoplift. A skilled Dakini Tarot reader, Conrad’s numerous books include Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press), a collaboration with Frank Sherlock titled The City Real and Imagined (Factory School), and The Book of Frank (Wave Books) and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books) as well as recent essays in the anthologies Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? (AK Press) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press). Among his various projects, Conrad also edits Jupiter 88: A Video Journal of Contemporary Poetry as well as Paranormal Poetics. His prizes include the Gill Ott Book Award for The Book of Frank and a 2011 Pew Fellowship by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Find out more about Conrad at http://caconrad.blogspot.com/.

Debrah Morkun believes in near death experiences and prays to the old gods. A graduate of Naropa University, Debrah is the author of The Ida Pingala (BlazeVOX, 2011) & Projection Machine (BlazeVOX, 2010) as well as several chapbooks. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she curates The Jubilant Thicket Literary Series & co-curates (with Kim Gek Lin Short) The General Idea Series. You can visit her at http://www.debrahmorkun.com/ for more of her poetry and reviews.

For more information call 412-624-6508 or visit the PCWS blog: pghwriterseries.wordpress.com

 

 

Thanks to our cosponsor, The University Book Center

Ron Carlson Public Reading – Thursday, April 5

Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Presents

Ron Carlson

 

Public Reading: Thursday, April 5, 8:30 pm,

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium

(reception to follow).

Free and Open to the Public

also: Craft Talk and Q&A, “Blue Heart: the Story of a Story,”

Friday, April 6, 10:30-11:30, 324 CL

 

Ron Carlson’s most recent book is the novel The Signal from Viking. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O.  Henry Prize series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies. Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing, is taught widely. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, the McGinnis Award at the Iowa Review, the Aspen Literary Award.  His novel Five Skies was One Book Rhode Island in 2009. He is Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine.

For more information call 412-624-6508 or visit the PCWS blog: pghwriterseries.wordpress.com

Thanks to our cosponsor, The University Book Center

 

 

 

 

It’s quiet in the store today. I can count sparrows on the wire across the road. My advice! She smiled yesterday when I told her. Just get married. Have a friend sing your favorite song at the wedding. Marriage, she said, what is it? Well, I said, it’s not life on a cake. It’s a bird taking your head in his beak and you walk the sky. It’s marriage. Sometimes it pinches like a bird’s mouth, but it’s definitely flying, it’s definitely a kind of flying.

—from “A Kind of Flying”

Eula Biss Public Reading: Thursday, March 22, 8:30pm

Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Presents

Eula Biss

Public Reading: Thursday, March 22, 8:30 pm,

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium.

Free and Open to the Public

also: Q&A, Thursday, March 22, 5-6 p.m. 501 CL

Eula Biss is the author of The Balloonists and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays. She holds a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern University. Her work is currently supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEA Literature Fellowship, and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Best Creative Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Fourth Genre, Third Coast, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and Harper’s.  She is currently at work on a book about metaphor in medicine.

For more information call 412-624-6508 or visit the PCWS blog: pghwriterseries.wordpress.com

Thanks to our cosponsor, The University Book Center

 

When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadways was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious. I believed my father when he said, “my dad could raise a pole by himself.” And I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.

 

Now, I tell my sister, these poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.

 

One summer, heavy rains fell in Nebraska and some green telephone poles grew small leafy branches.

—from “Time and Distance Overcome”

Dear Wayne, I’ve Been Humiliated: Farted in Yoga

With an unusual, disarming blend of autobiography and cultural commentary, noted poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum takes us through a spectrum of mortifying circumstances—in history, literature, art, current events, music, film, and his own life. His generous disclosures and brilliant observations go beyond prurience to create a poetics of abasement. Inventive, poignant, erudite, and playful, Humiliation plunges into one of the most disquieting of human experiences, with reflections at once emboldening and humane.

Join us Thursday, January 26, 8:30pm in Frick Fine Arts Auditorium for readings by Myung Mi Kim and Wayne Koestenbaum.
Reading will be followed by a conversation, moderated by Dawn Lundy Martin, about literary friendship.