November 12, 2011

Improved Lighting Reading Series

presents

poetry readings by

Chris Martin

Mary Austin Speaker

& four poets from Bloof Books,  Shanna Compton, Peter Davis, Sandra Simonds & Maureen Thorson

plus music by

Brian Abel

Saturday, November 12, 7:30 pm

Nightbird Books (in the BHK Kafe)

205 West Dickson Street

Fayetteville, Arkansas

FREE!

We no longer operate on hipster time, so expect the reading to start exactly at 7:30.

Improved Lighting Reading Series hosts monthly readings, mostly poetry and mostly Saturdays, with occasional musical acts, at Nightbird Books in the BHK Kafe.  Free admission.  Full coffee/wine/beer bar and food available in the café and authors’ books available for purchase through the bookstore.  Curated by Roger Barrett, Kaveh Bassiri, and Matthew Henriksen.  Visit us at improvedlighting.blogspot.com.  Contact improvedlighting@gmail.com.

Shanna Compton’s books include Down Spooky(Winnow, 2005), For Girls & Others (Bloof, 2008), andGamers (Soft Skull, 2004), and the chapbooks Rare Vagrants (Dusie, 2010), Scurrilous Toy (Dusie, 2007), and others. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse, McSweeney’s, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, the Poetry Foundation’s website, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a new poetry collection called The Blank Verge, forthcoming from Bloof Books in Spring 2012, with excerpts appearing in the Awl, Court Green, Women's Studies Quarterly, Eoagh, and other journals. She lives on the internet at shannacompton.com.

Peter Davis writes, draws, and makes music in Muncie, Indiana, with his sweet kids and sweet wife. His first book of poetry is Hitler’s Mustache (2007), and he edited Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art (2005) and coedited Poet’s Bookshelf II (2008) with Tom Koontz, all from Barnwood Press. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry series and recent work may be found in Lamination Colony, Everyday Genius, Jacket, No Tell Motel, and elsewhere. He teaches English at Ball State University. More, including his music project, Short Hand, at artisnecessary.com. His third poetry collection, Tina, is forthcoming from Bloof Books.

Chris Martin is the author of Becoming Weather (Coffee House 2011) and American Music (Copper Canyon 2007).  He is also the author of several chapbooks, including How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem (Brave Men 2011) and the forthcoming Enough (Ugly Duckling 2012).  He is an editor at Futurepoem books and curates the response blog Futurepost from the oldest house in Iowa City.

Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her second full-length collection of poems, Mother was a Tragic Girl, will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2012. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series; she is also the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009), and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Her poems have been published in many  journals such asPoetry, the Believer, the Colorado Review, Fence, theColumbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review, and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Assistant Professor of English at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia.

Mary Austin Speaker is the author of the chapbooks The Bridge (Push Press), In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys, and Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions). New work will appear in Mrs. Maybe and Boog City Reader, and has recently appeared in Pleiades, Big Bell, Boston Review, 20012, Iowa Review, New Orleans Review and elsewhere. She teaches writing and works as a freelance book designer in Iowa City, IA, where she lives with her husband, poet Chris Martin.

Maureen Thorson is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of the new book Applies to Oranges (Ugly Duckling, 2010), and a number of chapbooks, including Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor (2009), Mayport (2006), which won the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship, and Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004). Her poems can be found in many anthologies and journals, including the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, Exquisite Corpse, Hotel Amerika, LIT, The Hat, and6×6. Maureen is the publisher and editor of Big Game Books, a small press dedicated to emerging poets. She is also the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and the founder of NaPoWriMo, an annual project in which poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.