Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading} will hold its sixty-eighth literary event in October. Founded in 2005, each Red Rover event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. Experiment #68 "Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics" is a special event for the Chicago release of the new anthology by Nightboat Books. It is guest curated by local writer Jen ( Jay ) Besemer and features national writers: Oliver Bendorf ( WI ), Ching-In Chen ( WI ), Meg Day ( UT ) , TT Jax ( GA ), Tim Trace Peterson ( NY ), and Stacey Waite ( NE ).
About the new anthology:
The first of its kind, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics edited by TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes "poetics statements"—reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.
DATE:
Saturday, October 19th at 7pm
LOCATION:
Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave, 3rd floor
near the CTA Damen blue line
COST:
$4 suggested donation
BIOS:
OLIVER BENDORF's book, The Spectral Wilderness, was chosen by Mark Doty for the 2013 Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he recently earned his MFA and now teaches creativity, comics, and composition.
JEN JAY BESEMER is the author of several poetry books and chapbooks, including Telephone, Object with Man's Face, Quiet Vertical Movements, Ten Word Problems, and What Is Born. A new chapbook, Aster to Daylily, is forthcoming in 2014 from Damask Press. Jay's recombinant poetry projects are also found in Monsters & Dust, Aufgabe, Drunken Boat, BlazeVOX, e-ratio, Sentence and other delicious publications. Jay also writes feature essays and reviews, and teaches art and poetry workshops in and beyond Chicago. To find out more, visit www.jenbesemer.com .
CHING-IN CHEN is author of The Heart's Traffic ( Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press ) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities ( South End Press ). They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow and a member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Macondo writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. In Milwaukee, they are cream city review's editor-in-chief. See www.chinginchen.com .
MEG DAY, recently selected for Best New Poets of 2013, is a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and the author of When All You Have Is a Hammer ( winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest ) and We Can't Read This ( winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest ). A 2012 AWP Intro Journals Award Winner, Meg has also received awards and fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, and the International Queer Arts Festival. Meg is currently a PhD fellow in Poetry & Disability Poetics at the University of Utah.
TT JAX is a parent, poet, mixed media artist, and writer living in the Pacific Northwest by way of 28 years in the Deep South.
TIM TRACE PETERSON is a poet, editor, and scholar. The author of Since I Moved In ( Chax Press ) and numerous chapbooks, Peterson is also Editor / Publisher of EOAGH ( eoagh.com ) and Co-editor ( with TC Tolbert ) of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics ( Nightboat Books ). New poetry and criticism are forthcoming in Vanitas, TSQ, and Original Plumbing. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at CUNY Graduate Center.
STACEY WAITE is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln and has published four collections of poems: Choke ( winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize ), Love Poem to Androgyny, the lake has no saint ( winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize from Tupelo Press ), and Butch Geography ( also from Tupelo Press in 2013 ). Waite is the co-host of Prairie Schooner's podcast "Air Schooner" and has individual poems appearing most recently in Bloom, The Indiana Review, and Heart Quarterly. One of Waite's poems from Troubling the Line was selected by Denise Duhamel and David Lehman for Best American Poetry 2013.
RED ROVER SERIES:
Red Rover Series is curated by local writers Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. One of Chicago's premier literary series, the over sixty events have featured a diversity of renowned creative minds. Ideas for future Red Rover experiments can be emailed to the curators at redroverseries@yahoogroups.com . The schedule for upcoming events is listed at groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries and on the Red Rover Series facebook page.
UPCOMING:
NOVEMBER 9
Experiment #69: Virginia Konchan, Caroline Picard, Collision Theory dancers & long-distance collaborator Jill Magi
DECEMBER 13
Experiment #70: Stephanie Anderson, Julia Cohen, Sueyeun Juliette Lee & Soham Patel
