Friday May 26th, 2023
The Rotunda  - 4014 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA
Doors 7pm
Show 7:30 - 8:30

Book Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/627389106707

An excellent group of poets and a performance of excerpts from the HIST soundtrack. Hope to see you there!

See you there!

On February 27, William Lessard will host with the featured readers  Shira Dentz, Adam Tedesco, and James Belflower.

I’m looking forward to reading with excellent poets Shira and Adam! I’ll be premiering a new sound poetry piece titled Idiopathic for voice and electronics. Hope to see you there.

On February 13 @ 8 pm, William Lessard will host the open-mic with featured readers Ruth Danon and James Belflower.

I’m excited to read with Ruth. I’ll be performing some excerpts from With Walden for text and improvised video. Hope to see you there!

In August I'm heading to Denver to read in Travis Cebula's Ham on Rye series at the Alamo Cinema that pairs film and writing. One of the wonderful things about this series is that readers get to choose the film screened after their reading. I've chosen An American Werewolf in Paris, a film I reference in my most recent solo book, The Posture of Contour.

Hope to see you there!

More here!

I'll be performing 6.27.18 with musician Nate Pape in the A.E. Randolph presents series. Come check out Nate's powerful improvised guitar sojourns, and our newest text/visual/music collaboration.

My set will consist of text, improvised visuals, and Nate's experimental guitar work. I'll be using TouchViz, an awesome video mixing app from the great developers at Hexler.net. Here's what the TouchViz portion of the set looks like so far.

Hope to see you there!

I'm visiting John Reed's seminar on hybrid writing this week at the New School to talk all things aesthetically mingled and read from my multimedia collaboration with Matthew Klane, Canyons. We'll also look at work from Fence Digital and my most recent solo project. Should be fun!

Here's the reading list:

• Michael Leong's Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?
• Read Michael's artist statement on his book here.
• Read the attached excerpts from my solo hybrid project, The Posture of Countour, and my most recent hybrid collaboration with Matthew Klane, Canyons. Listen to the sound projects that accompany Posture here and Canyons here.
• Read this article on the poetics of my most recent solo collection, The Posture of Contour.

The final Yes! Poetry & Performance event of the season. Join us at Albany Center Gallery for readings/performances by Toby Altman, Emily Barton Altman, and Alifair Skebe.

$5 suggested donation

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Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and five chapbooks, including recently Security Theater (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016). His poems can or will be found in Crazyhorse, Jubilat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies.

Emily Barton Altman is a poet and editor living in Chicago. Recent publications include a chapbook, "Bathymetry" (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and poems in TL;DR, Parallax, wicked alice, and others. She is a recipient of a Poets & Writers Amy Award and received her MFA from New York University. She co-hosts and produces the poetry podcast Make (No) Bones with her partner, Toby Altman.

Alifair Skebe is a visual artist and author of the poetry collections Thin Matter; The Voyage of the Beagle, an Excerpt (forthcoming); “El Agua Es La Sangre de la Tierra” (written in English); and Postcards: Les Lettres d’Amour, a book of poems and collaged, text-art postcards. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including (em), *eratio, Interim, The Cape Rock, and So to Speak. She is an English/Writing Lecturer in the Educational Opportunity Program at the University at Albany.

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Albany Center Gallery is a non-profit art space dedicated to exhibiting skillful contemporary art of the Mohawk Hudson region. A community-based and community supported organization, the mission of Albany Center Gallery is to promote and exhibit contemporary visual art produced by emerging and established artists living primarily in the region and to inspire interest and provide enjoyment to an increasingly diverse audience.

A few blocks from our old space, the gallery is located in the Arcade Building behind a new Stacks Espresso bar. Entry into the space is up the alleyway to the right of the building (if you're facing from Broadway).

Hope to see you April 22nd for my reading at St. Rocco's Reading's for the dispossessed in Albany NY. I'll be reading some new work using electronics and found sounds!

Featured with these awesome readers:

Laurin DeChae is a PhD candidate in Composition & Rhetoric at SUNY Albany, acting as the poetry editor for Barzakh Magazine. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Animal Literary, Pretty Owl Poetry and elsewhere.

Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. He conducts interviews and analyzes dreams for Drunk In A Midnight Choir. His recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Funhouse, Fanzine, Fence, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, Plinth and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently HEART SUTRA (REALITY BEACH), and ABLAZA (Lithic Press)

Our third Yes! of the "spring" season will feature Barzakh, the University at Albany literary journal, and will be guest curated by current editor Victorio Reyes. We look forward to readings by Michael Leong, Jill Hanifan, Laurin Jefferson, Ben Nadler, and more!

$5 suggest donation

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Barzakh is a multi-genre journal with an internationalist stance. Emerging out of the English department at the University at Albany, SUNY, our focus is on innovative poetics, in keeping with a tradition of forward-looking department-based journals that spans from Don Byrd’s co-editorship of Jed Rasula’s Wch Way in the 1970s to The Little Magazine in the 1990s (our first issue features an interview with Rasula, and issues of both journals will be made available in our archive). We envisage the archive as a way to bring together our various departmental projects and initiatives, past and present, and to connect them to analogous or anomalous ventures elsewhere in the rhizomatic spirit of crossings that is Barzakh. Ours is not an “ism” but as an “isthmus” (see below) that links disparate articulations (between tongues, between histories) in the interplay of text, sound, and image.

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Albany Center Gallery is a non-profit art space dedicated to exhibiting skillful contemporary art of the Mohawk Hudson region. A community-based and community supported organization, the mission of Albany Center Gallery is to promote and exhibit contemporary visual art produced by emerging and established artists living primarily in the region and to inspire interest and provide enjoyment to an increasingly diverse audience.

A few blocks from our old space, the gallery is located in the Arcade Building behind a new Stacks Espresso bar. Entry into the space is up the alleyway to the right of the building (if you're facing from Broadway).

Melody Davis, a poet and art historian, is the author of four books including Holding the Curve (Broadstone Books), and Women’s Views:  The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America (University Press of New Hampshire).  Davis has held writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and she was a finalist in the National Poetry Series.  She is an associate professor of art history at the Sage College of Albany and publishes poetry and art criticism internationally.

Albany poets Matthew Klane and James Belflower, co-curators of Yes! Poetry & Performance Series, a project that “brings poetry into conversation with other art forms,” perform work from Canyons (Film Forum Press), a collection of images and texts reimagining  “Manifest Destiny” and its virulent consequences. Their performance is a combination of layered voices, projected collages, and soundscapes created with theremin and distorted vocal effects.

With Myself, Jaclyn Lovell, Matthew Klane, and Jeff T. Johnson. Matthew and I will be reading from our new book Canyons. This promises to be a great time! Hope to see you there!

More about the poets...

Jeff T. Johnson’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fanzine, PEN America, Jacket2, Encyclopedia Vol. 3, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. With Claire Donato, he collaborates on Special America. His open-field concrete digital poem THE ARCHIVERSE is documented at archiverse.net, and is anthologized in Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. He is currently a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.com.

Matthew Klane is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include Che (Stockport Flats, 2013) and B (Stockport Flats, 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press and an e-book My is forthcoming from Fence Digital (2016). He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he co-curates the Yes! Poetry & Performance Series and teaches at Russell Sage College. See: matthewklane.blogspot.com.

Jaclyn Lovell is a Part-Time Assistant Professor at The New School, where she received her MFA (2011). Wisconsin-born, she can still catch frogs with her bare hands and continues to smile on her subway commute from Brooklyn, her home for the last seven years. When she is not writing about the relationship between princesses and hunting, or the storing of trauma in limbs, she’s officiating weddings for close friends and family. Editor in Chief at LIT from 2009-2014, she’s thrilled to be back on the editing scene and working with the good people at Boog City!

My new multimedia collaboration, Canyons, with poet Matthew Klane is finished. We will be performing the work at 8pm, breathing alternate life into its images and sound at Publication Studio in Troy NY. Please stop by and enjoy the show!

In conjunction with the Albany Symphony's New Music Festival, Living Poets Musical Theater showcases the work of living poets Shira Dentz, Diana Alvarez, and James Belflower, and explores the intimate connection between poetry and music. Curated by Rebecca Wolff, Editor of FENCE Literary Journal, and featuring contemporary poets from the Capital Region and beyond.  

No Ticket Required!

Shira Dentz is the author of three books: black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), and how do i net thee (forthcoming) and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman), and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press, downloadable for free). Her writing has appeared widely in journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Western Humanities Review, and featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah. She was Drunken Boat‘s Reviews Editor from 2011-2016, and curates both DB’s blog feature, “What I’m Reading Now,” and reviews for Tarpaulin Sky. She teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com.

Diana Alvarez is a vocalist, poet, composer, video and sound artist whose poetry chapbook, Consultations with Bruja Juana, was published by Toadlily Press in 2009. As a PhD candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Diana is composing a Mexican ritual opera that descends from and contributes to a lineage of innovative women of color artists. Diana has performed as a vocalist and poet and taught in a range of venues in Texas, New Mexico, New York, and Massachusetts. For more information: diana-alvarez.com.

Smalbany: Contributors and friends share writing and stories about Albany, Fuze Boxes, Spray-tanned mayors, and Kegs and Eggs.
With Elisa Albert, Miriam Axel-Lute, Katie Vermilyea, Anton Pasquill, James Belflower, Frances Cortez O’Connor, Elizag, and others.

Hope to see you there!