Fence Books Feature, Friday, November 30, 2012
Friday, November 30 at 7:30 p.m., a celebration of Fence Books with editor Rebecca Wolff, and featuring readings by Rebecca Wolff and Fence authors Tina Brown Celona and Sasha Steensen. Plus a short Q&A (scroll down for videos).
Founded in 1998 by Rebecca Wolff, Fence is a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism that has a mission to redefine the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. It is Fence‘s mission to encourage writing that might otherwise have difficulty being recognized because it doesn’t answer to either the mainstream or to recognizable modes of experimentation. Fence is long-term committed to publishing from the outside and the inside of established communities of writing, seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and bedevil other systems that bring new writing to light.
Tina Brown Celona has published two collections of poetry with Fence Books, The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems (2002), which was the winner of the 2002 Alberta Prize from Fence Books, and Snip Snip! (2006). Recently, Tina’s poems have appeared in Action, Yes, Saltgrass, and Harp & Altar.
Sasha Steensen teaches poetry workshops, literature courses, letterpress printing, and bookmaking at Colorado State University. She is the author of The Method (Fence Books, 2008); A Magic Book, which won the Alberta duPont Bonsal Prize (Fence Books, 2004); Waters: A Lenten Poem (Free Poetry, 2012); A History of the Human Family (Flying Guillotine Press, 2010); The Future of an Illusion (Dos Press, 2008); and correspondence (with Gordon Hadfield, Handwritten Press, 2004). Her most recent book, House of Deer, will be out with Fence Books in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Denver Quarterly, Aufgabe, Bombay Gin, Free Verse, Shearsman, Shiny, and La Petit Zine. Her essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Chain, P-queue, and Interim. Steensen is also coeditor of Bonfire Press (http://bonfirepress.colostate.edu), and she serves as one of the poetry editors for Colorado Review.
Born and raised in New York City, Rebecca Wolff earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1993, and in 1997 founded the literary journal Fence. She is the author of The Beginner (Riverhead, 2012), The King (W.W. Norton, 2009); Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004); and Manderley (2001), which was selected by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 National Poetry Series.
Q&A