Reading by Coffee House Press authors, Joseph Lease, Lightsey Darst, Maureen Owen, and Laird Hunt. Friday, May 11, 2012, 7 p.m. Scroll down for videos of the readings.
Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011); Broken World (Coffee House Press); and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease’s poems “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition). “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002. He teaches at the California College for the Arts.
Originally from Florida, Lightsey Darst is a writing instructor, dance critic, and dancer who lives in Minneapolis where she curates a writers’ salon. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Monkey Bicycle, New Letters, and elsewhere. Find the Girl from Coffee House Press is her first collection.
Maureen Owen is a poet, editor and publisher currently living in Denver, CO. She is the author of ten poetry titles, most recently Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press. Erosion’s Pull was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has had work most recently published in Poems from the Women’s Movement (The Library of America), Columbia Review, and Visiting Wallace, (University of Iowa). Other books include Imaginary Income, Zombie Notes, a brass choir approaches the burial ground, The No-Travels Journal, and Untapped Maps. She currently teaches at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, and is editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night. Her title Edges of Water is forthcoming from Chax Press.
Laird Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, mock parables, and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), from Smokeproof Press, and three novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003) and The Exquisite (2006), all from Coffee House Press. A new novel, Ray of the Star, was recently released by Coffee House. He is published in France by Actes Sud, and has novels either published or forthcoming in Japan and Italy. His writings, reviews, and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad in, among other places, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, Grand Street, The Believer, Fence, Conjunctions, Brick, Mentor, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, he has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace. See www.lairdhunt.net.
Founded by Allan Kornblum, Coffee House Press has grown from a poetry magazine and letterpress to one of the premier nonprofit literary publishers in the nation.
Now ensconced in the Grain Belt Brewery Bottling House in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee House Press publishes between fourteen and sixteen distinctive books a year and is known for its consistent editorial excellence; for a commitment to celebrating the diversity that makes America unique; and for their continuing commitment to writers, to readers, and to literature as an art, and as the most articulate expression of humanities past and present, its worst fears, and its best hopes and dreams.
Their diverse, award-winning backlist includes books by Karen Tei Yamashita, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Patricia Smith, Frank Chin, Sam Savage, Kao Kalia Yang, Laird Hunt, and Brian Evenson.
