Please Note: The 2015 book fair will take place on Thursday, April 2 from 10AM – 7PM at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Click here for a full list of participating publishers.
Tuesday, March 31
Seeking the Glyph: The Glyphic Works of Edward Sanders
Poets House- 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282
During the course of his long and diverse career as a poet, musician, historian, publisher, activist, and pacifist, Edward Sanders has invented a glyphic alphabet, a colorful script of hand-drawn characters, symbols, and graphemes that represent everything from destiny to the plank unit. In his words: “A Glyph is a drawing that is charged with literary, emotional, historical or mythic, and poetic intensity.� Sanders’ pictographic language occupies a shifting spot on the continuum between text and image; rune and icon; poetry and art. At home on both the page and the wall, his glyphs form a writing system that picks up where known lexicons leave off. Organized in conjunction with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Seeking the Glyph is an exhibition of select drawings and daybooks authored by Sanders between 1962 and the present. Exhibition runs until – Saturday, May 23.
Curated by Ammiel Alcalay and Kendra Sullivan, items are drawn from Edward Sanders’ personal archive.
Tuesday, March 31
6PM-9PM
Lost and Found Series V Launch and Opening Reception: Seeking the Glyph
Poets House- 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282
6PM
Opening Reception
7PM
A Discussion with Edward Sanders and Lost & Found: Series V editors Alex Wermer-Colan, Gabrielle Kappes, Kai Krienke, and Zohra Saed
Please join artist Edward Sanders as he discusses his both his glyphic works and his personal archive, classified chronologically in banker boxes since the early sixties, and including hand-drawn glyphs, ephemera, magazine layouts, daybooks, and Fugs album covers on view as part of Seeking the Glyph, curated by Ammiel Alcalay and Kendra Sullivan, from Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. In addition, hear from Lost & Found Series V editors: Alex Wermer-Colan, Gabrielle Kappes, Kai Krienke, and Zohra Saed will discuss their own work editing previously unpublished texts unearthed from personal and institution archives around the world. Their forthcoming publications include William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, Kathy Acker’s letters and an homage to LeRoi Jones, Jean Senac’s manifesto, written during the French-Algerian War, and Langston Hughes’ travelogues from the Near East.
Lost & Found Series V— featuring chapbooks by Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac—will be available at the event for pre-publication purchase!
Wednesday, April 1
10AM – 1PM & 2PM – 5PM
Hands-on Workshops with Barbara Henry and Celine Lombardi
Center for Book Arts- 28 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001
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To kick off the Chapbook Festival, the Center for Book Arts will host workshops on hand-bookbinding and letterpress printing for writers, taught by artists Barbara Henry and Celine Lombardi. Workshops run 10AM-1PM and 2PM-5PM. You can take either or both, but you must RSVP in advance. Get your feet wet in printing and bookmaking! RSVP required: . $20 donation at the door covers materials.
3:15PM-4:30PM
Inside the New York Public Library: Chapbook Collection
New York Public Library – Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Room 227
Get a behind the scenes look at the New York Public Library’s chapbook collections with Isaac Gewirtz and Karen Gisonny, including the history of the Library’s collections, the evolution of the genre in Europe and America, and current collecting of chapbooks and zines since the 1970s. Rare chapbooks from the Library’s collections will be on display. Refreshments will be served.
Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Karen Gisonny, Helen Bernstein Librarian for Periodicals & Journals
RSVP:
6:30PM – 8:30PM
Five Years of Lost & Found: New American Poetry & Beyond
Martin E. Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center CUNY
Come celebrate five years of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative with Ammiel Alcalay and Aoibheann Sweeney, along long-time friends of the press: Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, and Dorothy Wang. Each speaker will read from and comment on pivotal texts published by Lost & Found Series I-V, touching upon the works and impact of writers like: Kathy Acker, Amiri Baraka, Nancy Cunard, Diane di Prima, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Jean Sénac, and Jack Spicer, among many others. Over the last five years, Lost & Found has traveled to over 50 archives both in the US and abroad; published 35 chapbooks; released 5 books under the rubric of Lost & Found Elsewhere; curated 2 exhibitions of art and ephemera related to New American Poetry at Poets House; held numerous workshops, readings, and events, such as the powerful reunion of the Umbra Workshop in 2014; and made countless previously unpublished novels, poems, manifestoes, letters, and screenplays available for the first time to the public. But perhaps most remarkably, Lost & Found has built a sustaining and cross-disciplinary community of scholars, educators, writers, artists, activists, and presses around its radical and recuperative publishing efforts.
Lost & Found Series V— featuring chapbooks by Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac—will be available at the event for pre-publication purchase!
Thursday, April 2
10AM-7PM
Book Fair
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Over 60 presses share their publications on the concourse level of the CUNY Graduate Center.
Click here for the full list of publishers.
All events listed below take place on C-Level at The Graduate Center, CUNY, except for the 7pm Award Ceremony.
10AM-6PM
CLMP Advice Dispensary
11AM
Nuts, Bolts, & Beyond: How to Get Your Work into Print
Melissa Faliveno, associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks with chapbook publishers and authors to discuss the collaborative publishing process, innovative forms and expanding genres, and how to get your work into print. Featuring Shanna Compton and Jackie Clark of Bloof Books, Joe Pan and Dominique Townsend of Brooklyn Arts Press, Bianca Stone and Alina Gregorian of Monk Books, Emily Skillings and Emily Brandt of No, Dear, and MC Hyland and JenMarie Macdonald of DoubleCross Press.
12:30PM
The Chapbook Across Genres
The chapbook is a platform for experimentation that expands the notion of how publications function and writing performs. Deeply interdisciplinary, the form predicts future hybrid genres. Kimiko Hahn moderates a discussion with Karl Larocca a.k.a. Kayrock from Kayrock Screenprinting, Jacqueline Waters from The Physiocrats, and Rachael Michelle Wilson and Ada Smailbegovic from The Organism for Poetic Research, all of whom combine text and image, digital and print mediums, and poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and critical writing.
1:30PM
Lunch Poems with New York City Poets
Recent recipients of fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Poets House share their work in this lunch hour introduction to the rising stars.
Featuring:
Poets House: J. Mae Barizo and Vincent Toro
Cave Canem: Adrienne Christian and Jonterri Gadson
Poetry Project: Miriam Atkin, Maxe Crandall, and Morgan Vo
3PM
Raven Press Redux: Chapbook Publishing as a Pedagogical Tool
Last year, the all-girls publishing collective Raven Press from Academy for Young Writers High School was asked to participate in a panel on writing, editing, and publishing as pedagogical practices. There, we asked: How do self-expression and self-publication inspire community-building and inform a sense of personal efficacy? If we produce and distribute our own chapbooks, pamphlets, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, are we taking charge of our own stories? Our own lives? This year, the founders of Raven Press prepare for writing – and life – after high school, while also training the next generation of teenage publishers to take the helm of their press. Come hear poets, publishers and educators Mahogany Browne, Alex Cuff, and Rebecca Gee, Adam Falkner, Camonghne Felix and Jon Sands, carry the conversation with Raven Press forward. The discussion will be followed by a short open mic for students and educators alike. Representing Raven Press is Chris Bardales, Kari Henry, Jessica Michel, Lnette Smith, Ashaunte Solomon, and Tianna Wells.
4:30PM
The Margins are the Center: CUNY Students Publishing with Chapbook Presses
The Graduate Center has a long history of harboring educators, administrators, and activists who double as poets and publishers. In “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,� Adrienne Rich writes: “I think of myself as a teacher of language: that is, as someone for whom language has implied freedom, who is trying to aid others to free themselves through the written word, and above all through learning to write it themselves.� Please join poets and scholars Iris Cushing, Tonya Foster, Maryam Parhizkar, Anna Moschovakis, Sara Jane Stoner, and Simone White as they discuss their experience of working by, through, alongside, because of, and in spite of academic mandates in order to pursue creative projects, publish innovative texts, and establish an longview writerly community outside its architecture.
7PM
PSA Chapbook Fellowship Award Ceremony
Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre -50 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011
The Poetry Society of America launched the PSA Chapbook Fellowship Program more than a decade ago to establish the template for a community of peers and mentors who encourage and support talented poets who have not yet published a first book. Since the inception of the program we have introduced 44 new voices—next spring, the total will grow to 48. A uniquely supportive publication opportunity, the Fellowship provides exposure, mentorship, and career-building resources for promising poets in the earliest stages of their careers. Six years ago, PSA built on the program’s early momentum by joining with the CUNY Chapbook Festival. Each year, the Festival is scheduled to coincide with the launch of the new set of Chapbooks. This year’s reading will take place at Âinclude Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre and readers include the 2015 Chapbook Fellows HL Hazuka, Max Ritvo, Eva Maria Saavedra, and Callie Siskel, alongside this year’s poet-judges Elizabeth Alexander, Forrest Gander, Marilyn Hacker, and Jean Valentine.
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