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Essay Press Reading Timelines: 1b: Past Events (Unseen Archive), 4: Christina Vega-Westhoff Workshops & Events

Where:
Sugar City
1239 Niagara Street
Buffalo, New York 14213
Date: March 24, 2018
Time: 7:00-9:00 p.m.

A book launch / reading / celebration with EP authors Carla Harryman, Karla Kelsey, and Mary-Kim Arnold and local Buffalo poet Christina Vega-Westhoff!

Mary-Kim Arnold is the author of Litany for the Long Moment, which won the 2016 Essay Press Open Book Prize. A multidisciplinary artist and writer, her work has appeared in a number of literary and art journals, including Tin House, The Georgia Review, Hyperallergic, and The Rumpus, where she serves on the Advisory Committee. The recipient of fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, she holds graduate degrees from Vermont College of Fine Arts and Brown University, where she teaches Nonfiction Writing Program. She was born in Seoul, South Korea and lives in Rhode Island.

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Karla Kelsey has published three books of poetry, most recently A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014). Blood Feather, her fourth book of poetry is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and was published November 1st 2017. Poems and creative prose have been published by such journals as Bomb, Fence, Conjunctions, New American Writing, The Boston Review, Verse, and Tupelo Quarterly. Critical essays on poetry, poetics, visual art, and pedagogy have appeared in anthologies and literary journals. From 2010-2018 she edited The Constant Critic, Fence Books’ online journal of poetry reviews and she currently co-publishes SplitLevel Texts, a small press of book-length hybrid genre projects.

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Carla Harryman has authored twenty books of experimental poetry, prose, essays, and plays. Her work begins in a radical exploration of the sentence and its non/narrative performative capacities, developing in the context of the West Coast Language Writing scene of the 1970s and 1980s as well as in text-based performance and interdisciplinary collaboration. Much of her recent work has focused on zones of negativity and hope in a durational project titled “Letters Not about Hope” and on writing informed by improvisation and sampling in music and time-based art. Recent works include Gardener of Stars, an Opera, an exploration of “the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire,” presented in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles as a performance for microelectronics, piano, and speaking and singing voices. Her most recent books are Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (trans., Sabine Huynh), a collection of Poets Theater plays and performance texts written between 2001-2015 released in English and French volumes (To Series, PURH, 2018) Impromptu de Hannah/Hannah Cut In, an experimental play for typewriters and speaking voices (trans., Abigail Lang, Joca Seria, 2018), and the documentary essay Artifact of Hope (Ordinance Series, Kenning Edition’s, 2017). Other critical writing and presentations have most recently focused on Poets Theater and text-based improvisation, durational time and the politics of contemporary feminist experimental writing, and Canadian novelist Gail Scott’s The
Obituary
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Christina Vega-Westhoff is a poet, translator, aerialist, and teaching artist who works locally with The Bird’s Nest Circus Arts, the Geneseo Migrant Center, Just Buffalo Literary Center, and Young Audiences of Western New York. Her first book, Suelo Tide Cement, won the Nightboat Poetry Prize and is forthcoming this spring.