Poetry at the UAG Gallery This Friday, Nov 13

Albany Poets and Jawbone are once again combining forces to bring poetry to the UAG Gallery.  This Friday Jawbone will present a reading with James Belflower and Lucyna Prostko followed by our monthly open mic for poetry and spoken word.

Here is the information from the good folks at Jawbone:

Jawbone is pleased to host a first book release party/reading this Friday, November 13th at 6:30pm in the United Artists Guild Gallery (247 Lark Street). Please come early and enjoy a refreshment/chat with the authors.

An open mic hosted by Albany Poets will follow at 8pm.

We hope that you will attend and support two very talented poets and PhD Candidates.

COMMUTER by James Belflower: Modeling the courage of the witness as a compelling poetic subjectivity, COMMUTER attempts to encourage response by negotiating notions of the self. Juliana Spahr calls COMMUTER "a painfully beautiful and transformatively aestheticized book."

James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press) and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. He won the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize and his work  appears, or is forthcoming in: Jacket, EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Apostrophe Cast, First Intensity, Reconfigurations, Konundrum Engine and O&S, among others. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting and exchange of poetry resources.

Infinite Beginnnings—Lucyna Prostko's fierce, quiet book shines like the
wooden boat in "Homecoming" that "beckons the winds with all its power."  Prostko makes poetic speech feel somehow inevitable, yet unexpected and fresh; there is nothing self-conscious, no straining for high art, in her mastery. "The human stories in her poems haunt me. . . . Clear-eyed and steadfast in her honesty, Prostko doesn't pretend to easy understanding of the mystery she touches at the deep heart of our being, but her love for the world is palpable in every poem"--Joan Larkin, Judge, Bright Hill Poetry Book Competition.

Lucyna Prostko was born in 1971 in Poland, where she grew up in a small village of Solistowka in Mazury. From an early age, she has been immersed in the stories of her grandparents' lives who have been tragically affected by the outbreak of World War II. She came to New York City at the age of 19. She received her BA degree in English from Hunter College and MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was awarded The New York Times Fellowship. She has been writing poetry in both Polish and English, and her work has been influenced by both Polish and American poets, in particular Boleslaw Lesmian, Czeslaw Milosz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska as well as Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, and Louise Gluck. Her poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Fugue, Washington Square, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ellipsis, Quiddity, Five Points, and other literary magazines and in her collection, Infinite Beginnings, judged winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition by Joan Larkin and published by Bright Hill in 2009. She has been teaching literature and creative writing for the past ten years. She currently teaches at Queensbury High School in upstate New York and pursues Ph.D. in English at SUNY Albany. She lives on Hunt Lake in the Adirondacks with her husband, Mirko.

The evening starts at 6:30PM with the “No Gimmicks Open Mic” hosted by Mary Panza will begin after the two featured poets at 8:00PM.  Sign up for the open mic will be available throughout the night. 

Poetry at the UAG

This Friday poetry returns to the UAG Gallery with poets Jacqueline Jones LaMon and Carol Graser. 

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers' Conference. A Chancellor's University Fellow and an associate poetry editor of the Indiana Review, she is in her third year of her MFA studies in poetry at Indiana University Bloomington. Her poetry has appeared/will appear in Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Fugue, and WarpLand among other journals. Her first novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me, was published by One World/Ballantine Books in 2002. (2005)

Carol Graser hosts a monthly poetry series at Saratoga Springs legendary Caffe Lena and has performed her work at various events and venues around New York. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals. Foothills Publishing has just published her first book of poetry, The Wild Twist of Their Stems.

Albany Poets and Jawbone Productions Reading series present Poetry @ the UAG on the second and fourth Friday's of each month starting at 7:00PM.  This series is sponsored by Scratch Bakery Cafe.

Poetry at The UAG

Jawbone and Albany Poets are proud to bring poetry back to the UAG Gallery on Lark Street.  The series started on January 25 with Thom Francis and Michael Peters and continues tonight with a special reading from Flim Magazine featuring Jaye Bartell, Jennifer Karmin, Michael Ives, and Deborah Poe. 

The next reading will be on February 22 with poets Rusty Barnes, Jason Tandon, Rebecca Schumejda, Dan Wilcox, and Margot Lynch. 

Be sure to check back for the complete schedule for this new series of Poetry at the UAG.

Jawbone Returns This Friday with Michael Peters and Thom Francis

This coming Friday (January 25) Albany Poets and Jawbone are bringing poetry and spoken word back to the UAG Gallery on Lark Street with a new season of this long-running series featuring both local artists and visiting poets from around the country.

The doors open at 6:30PM with the poetry beginning at 7:00PM with writer, poet, and musician Michael Peters and Albany Poets own Thom Francis.

About Michael Peters

The “writing” attributable to “Michael Peters”—his poetry, his visual poetry, his fiction, his critical writing—has appeared in publications such as SleepingFish, Word for/Word, Lungfull, Xtant, Tool a Magazine, Spinning Jenny, Posted, American Weddings, and Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, to name a few. His visual poetry has appeared in galleries, anthologies, and exhibits, and can be found in various special collections and avant-garde libraries, among these: The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. As a musician and a sound-text performer, most notably in Poem Rocket, his recordings have been released on a variety of independent labels. In 2007, Atavistic (the avant jazz and rock label based out of Chicago), released Poem Rocket’s fourth full-length recording, a double-CD titled Invasion! Vaast Bin; n Ephemerisi is his first book.

For more, go to: http://www.calamaripress.com/vaast_bin.htm

About Thom Francis

Thom Francis, an upstate New York native, has been a writer and spoken word artist since he was old enough to understand, and therefore question the nature of the world in which we all exist. His skepticism, an attribute that seems to have been instilled in Thom since birth, has only been strengthened by the struggles in which he has encountered throughout the course of his thirty years of survival. These various struggles have made Thom an extremely strong and empathetic person, as well as the perfect candidate to pursue a calling in which he exposes the peculiarity exhibited by the human race. His work, based upon personal experience as well as general observations, always reveals an outlook commonly overlooked by the average observer.

Since Thom has been involved in the Albany area poety scene he has been featured at such open mics and events as The School of Night (Valentines), Vox (Albany Center Galleries), Web of Consciousness (C@fe Web), Live from the Living Room (Capital District Gay & Lesbian Community Center), Open Spoken (Colony Café, Woodstock), Kill Your TV, Feed Your Ears (Lark Street Bookshop), Third Thursday Poetry Open Mic (Lark Street Bookshop), Poets in the Park (Washington Park), the Albany Word Fest 2001, 2002 (Thacher Park), 2003 (Valentines), 2006 (UAG Gallery), and 2007 (Tess' Lark Tavern), and LARKfest 2006 and 2007.

For more, go to: http://www.albanypoets.com/poets/francis