The Ordinary Evening Reading Series

That's All Folks!

2011-07-12T14:35:00.003-04:00

After five fabulous seasons, the Ordinary Evening Reading Series is ending. It's been an amazing time. We've met wonderful writers and had wonderful audiences show up every month, rain or snow or shine or holidays. In our absence, please support the other terrific literary events in the Elm City. Keep well and keep reading.

Rescheduled! - April 5: Annie Murphy Paul and Carl Zimmer

2011-03-23T09:54:00.000-04:00

Annie Murphy Paul's most recent book is Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives. A magazine journalist and book author who writes about the biological and social sciences, she was born in Philadelphia, and graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A former senior editor at Psychology Today magazine, she was awarded the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, Discover, Health, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. She is the author of The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. An article based on Origins was included in the Best American Science Writing 2009.

Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To Evolution. Carl's books have won a number of accolades, including "One of the Top 100 Books of 2004" by The New York Times Book Review. His articles have been published in the New York Times, as well as magazines including National Geographic, Time, Scientific American,Science, and Popular Science.

From 1994 to 1998 Carl was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor and writes a monthly column about the brain. He is now a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. He is also the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Carl also hosts "Meet the Scientist," a podcast from the American Society for Microbiology.

Carl's work has been anthologized in both Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. He has won fellowships and a number of awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Journalism Award twice, for his work for The New York Times and for his blog, The Loom. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.

April 26: Eleanor Lerman and Gail Mazur

2011-03-22T10:21:00.001-04:00

Eleanor Lerman's most recent collection of poems, The Sensual World Re-Emerges was published by Sarabande Press in 2010. It has been nominated for three awards: ForeWord's Book of the Year (poetry), The Audre Lorde Poetry Award from the Publishing Triangle and the Lambda Literary Award (poetry). Her collection of short stories, The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press), came out in 2009.

Eleanor's first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press), was published in 1973 when she was twenty-one and was nominated for a National Book Award. While Eleanor quickly became known as an exciting young poet with a direct, new voice, she also faced criticism for her explicit depiction of then-shocking subject matter. One more collection, Come the Sweet By and By followed in 1975, and then, partly in response to the backlash against her first book, she did not write another book of poems until 2001, when The Mystery of Meteors. This was followed by Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (2005), which was awarded the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the year's most outstanding book of poetry.

Raised in the Bronx and Far Rockaway, Eleanor has lived in New York City all her life.

Gail Mazur’s poems celebrate the din and detail of ordinary life. Her most recent volume, Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, won the Massachusetts Book Award and her 2001 volume They Can’t Take That Away from Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. Gail published her first collection, Nightfire in 1978 and followed that with The Pose of Happiness (1986).

A graduate of Smith College, Gail has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Active in the Boston and Cambridge literary communities, she has served as the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center, and as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

March 15: Michael Alienikov and Daniel Swift

2011-02-21T12:03:00.000-05:00

Michael Alenyikov’s first book, Ivan and Misha, was called “Highly Recommended” by the Library Journal, while Booklist praised its “sweetness, compassion, and great beauty.” Michael’s short stories have appeared in Canada’s Descant, The Georgia Review, the James White Review, New York Stories, and Modern Words. They have been anthologized in Best Gay Stories, 2008 and Tartts Four: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers. His essays have appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review. A MacDowell Fellow, Michael was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007. He has worked as a bookstore clerk, clinical psychologist, cab driver, and interactive media writer, and lives in San Francisco.

Bomber County, Daniel Swift’s first book, has been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian, among others. The New York Times called the book, Daniel's account of his lost bomber pilot grandfather interspersed with the poetry of the World War II aviators, "a freewheeling exploration elegantly spiraling from the airborne Icarus to the husk of Cologne." Daniel teaches in the English department at Skidmore College, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Bookforum, and the Nation. Born in the U.K. and educated at Oxford and Columbia, he lives in New York City.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series Announces its Spring 2011 Season

2011-02-15T10:23:00.001-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series starts its 2011 Spring Series on Tuesday January 18th -an ordinary evening -at 7PM in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (272 College Street, New Haven). We're excited to welcome a diverse range of writers - and we hope to welcome you, too.

Our Spring line-up includes:

February 15: Edith Pearlman and Elizabeth Ziemska
March 15: Daniel Swift and Michael Alenyikov
RESCHEDULED April 5: Annie Murphy Paul and Carl Zimmer
April 26: Gail Mazur and Eleanor Lerman

If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Please join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

February 15: Edith Pearlman and Elizabeth Ziemska

2011-01-25T11:09:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision on the front page of the January 14th New York Times Book Review, Roxana Robinson wrote that in Pearlman’s stories “we’re caught up in a stream of beguiling details. . .as Pearlman describes a world that’s familiar, beloved and fascinating all at once.” But then, says Robinson, Pearlman “slips in an emotion. . . which permeates the landscape, leaving it known but dreaded, familiar but unbearable, a place we never want to inhabit, but do.”

Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories has just been published by Lookout Press. She is the author of three other collections of stories: Vaquita (1996), Love Among The Greats (2002), and How To Fall (2005). She has published more than 250 works of short fiction and short non-fiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and on-line publications. Her work has been selected by Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Collection, Best Short Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Preservation, and Yankee. Her travel writing has been published in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and salon.com.

Elizabeth Ziemska's first published story "A Murder of Crows," appeared in Tin House (Spring 2007), was a finalist for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award, and made the extended list for Best American Non-Required Reading. "Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken" was published in Interfictions:2 (2009). Elizabeth is currently at work on a novel that combines Russia, mythology, sturgeon, and two women.

Born in Poland, Elizabeth grew up in New York and L.A. She went to Vassar and UCLA, where she earned a degree in Biology. After several years working as an agent first in the New York publishing industry and then in L.A.’s film industry, she decided to pursue writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She earned her MFA in 2008 and lives in L.A. with her husband, stepson, and three crazy dogs.

December 14: Phillip Lopate and Cynthia Zarin

2010-11-22T10:27:00.001-05:00

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. The most recent of his many books is At the End of the Day, a collection of his selected poems published in 2010. He has written prolifically in many genres: personal essay, novel, poetry, memoir, criticism, and biography, in addition to editing a number of anthologies. His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays , several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

Among Phillip's many awards are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants.

After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Cynthia Zarin 's newest poetry collection is The Ada Poems, published in September. She has written three other books of poetry—The Watercourse, Fire Lyric, and The Swordfish Tooth—and five books for children. Born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia, Cynthia is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. Her recent articles include “An Enlarged Heart,” an autobiographical essay on a child’s sudden illness, which was selected for the 2004 “Best American Essays,” and “Big Cheese,” about the reincarnation of Murray’s Cheese Shop, in Greenwich Village, which appeared in “Best Food Writing,” in 2005. Cynthia's Profiles include “Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the Perils of Childhood,” which won a 2006 Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and “Seeing Things: The Art of Olafur Eliasson.” “Green Dreams: A Queen, A Shipwreck, and the Mystery Behind a Rare Set of Jewels” won the 2006 Richard T. Liddicoat Award for Consumer National Reporting. She has also written for the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Gourmet, where she is a contributing editor.

The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Cynthia teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.

November 16: Paul Beckman and Mark Wunderlich

2010-11-15T10:55:00.002-05:00

Paul Beckman is a real estate salesman, writer, snorkeler, traveler and photographer. His most recent collection is the chapbook Maybe I Should Sit Quietly In A Dark Room For A While, published by Silkworms Ink. His earlier collection Come! Meet My Family and Other Stories was published by Weighted Anchor Press. Paul specializes in the short story, flash fiction and micro stories. His work has appeared in a large number of journals including The Connecticut Review, The New Haven Review, Onthebus, Playboy, 5 Trope, Exquisite Corpse, and Opium. Three of his six-word stories about New York City were selected as winners in the competition sponsored by the 92 Street Y. Paul holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives with his wife in Madison, Connecticut.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Amy Lowell Trust. Individual poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Paris Review, Slate, Boston Review and Yale Review and his work has been widely anthologized. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Ohio University and San Francisco State University, and currently teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

October 19: Ruth Lepson and Joanna Smith Rakoff

2010-09-21T13:14:00.004-04:00

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music and has been collaborating with jazz musicians and a few classical ones in recent years. Her books of poems are Dreaming in Color, which was published by Alice James Books along with Alice Mattison’s book of poems, Animals, lo these many years ago; Morphology, a book of synaesthetic moments from dreams written as prose poems, along with photographs of hers and artist Rusty Crump; and I Went Looking for You. The last two were published by blazevox.org. You can see Morphology at their website as it’s a free ebook as well as a printed book. Ruth edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, published by the U of Illinois. Her poems and prose have been in Jacket, Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix, EOAGH, Shampoo, Carve, Agni, and many other periodicals and online magazines. She used to organize poetry readings for Oxfam America. She lives in Cambridge.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize, a selection of Barnes and Noble's First Look Book Club, an IndieNext pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O:The Oprah Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University; University College, London; and Oberlin College. You can read some of her articles and essays at her webpage.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series Fall 2010 Series Starts September 21st!

2010-08-25T20:20:00.004-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series starts its 2010 Fall Series on Tuesday September 21st, an ordinary evening -at 7PM in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (272 College Street, New Haven). We're excited to welcome a diverse range of writers - and we hope to welcome you, too.

Our Fall line-up includes:

September 21: Caryl Phillips and Matt Debenham
October 19: Ruth Lepson and Joana Smith Rakoff
November 16: Mark Wunderlich and Paul Beckman
December 14: Phillip Lopate and Cynthia Zarin

If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

Caryl Phillips and Matt Debenham

2010-08-24T10:29:00.001-04:00

Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts, West Indies, and brought up in Leeds. He is the author of numerous books of non-fiction and fiction. Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, and A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was also short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has written extensively for the stage, television, and film, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Professor of English at Yale University, he currently lives in New York City.

Matt Debenham's story collection The Book of Right and Wrong (published in 2010) won the Ohio State University Press Prize for fiction and featured the Pushcart Prize-nominated title story “The Book of Right and Wrong.” Matt holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Roanoke Review, The Pinch, Weston Magazine, Dogwood, Painted Bride Quarterly, and North Atlantic Review. He teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, writes a blog and twitters.

May 18th: Sven Birkerts and Rebecca Chace

2010-04-26T10:04:00.003-04:00

Sven Birkerts is a noted essayist, editor, instructor, and reviewer. The editor of AGNI since July 2002, he also is director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. His most recent books are Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (2007, Graywolf) and Reading Life: Books for the Ages (2007, Graywolf). The best-known among his many books is The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber & Faber), and he has also written a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (2002, Viking). Sven has edited a number of works, including Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Writers and the Muse (Graywolf), Writing Well (with Donald Hall), and The Evolving Canon (Allyn & Bacon).

The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation grant, among others, Sven has also won the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle and the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN for the best book of essays. Sven reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children. Sven also plays guitar in the Doghouse Band.

Rebecca Chace is the author of the forthcoming novel Leaving Rock Harbor (Scribner, June, 2010) and the memoir Chautauqua Summer, which was a New York Times "Notable Book" and named "Editor's Choice" and one of the "Picks for Summer" in the New York Times Book Review. She wrote the novel Capture the Flag and the essay “Looking for Robinson Crusoe” (Fiction Magazine), which was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize.

An actress and playwright, Rebecca's plays include Colette (Theatre for the New City) in which she played Colette and hung from a trapeze. She also wrote Vershinin’s Wife (performed in the FringeACT festival) and adapted Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening (produced by Book-It Repertory Theatre at the Seattle Repertory Theatre). Capture the Flag was adapted as a screenplay by Rebecca and director Lisanne Skyler, and premiered at the Aspen Short Film Festival in April, 2010. In addition to acting in the film, Rebecca has moonlighted as a trapeze artist and likes to swing flaming torches (outdoors only).

Rebecca has won several prizes and fellowships. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard College and also teaches Fiction and Dramatic Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the City College of New York. One of her favorite things in the world is to sing country western songs in the Doghouse Band with Sven Birkerts playing guitar, along with other members from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

April 20: Allan Appel and Jake Halpern

2010-03-18T10:27:00.002-04:00

Allan Appel's most recent book is The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air (2009). A novelist, poet, and playwright who was born in Chicago in 1946, Allan's books include Club Revelation, High Holiday Sutra (winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award) and The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His writing has appeared in The National Jewish Monthly, The Progressive, and National Lampoon, and his plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, New Haven, and Provincetown. He has published six novels, a biography, two collections of poetry, a book on botany, and A Portable Apocalypse, a handy anthology of erudite and humorous quotations about the end of the world. Among his plays, Dear Heartsey, a staged adaptation of the letters of a colonial New Yorker, Abigail Franks, was commissioned by the American Jewish Historical Society, and presented, starring Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, at New York's Jewish Museum, at Queens College, City University of New York, and at Yale. In 2003, Flight, a play about the perils of patriotism, was presented in a staged reading by the New England Academy of Theatre in New Haven.

Jake Halpern is an author, journalist, and radio producer. His first book, Braving Home (2003), was a main selection for the Book of the Month Club by Bill Bryson and was a Library Journal “Book of the Year.” His next book, Fame Junkies (2007), was the basis for an original series on NPR's All Things Considered and portions of the book were published in both the New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly. His first work of fiction, a fantasy novel entitled Dormia (2009), has been hailed by the American Library Association as the next Harry Potter. As a journalist, Jake has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and Outside. In the realm of radio, Jake is a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and This American Life. Last, but not least, he is a fellow of Morse College at Yale University, where he teaches a class on journalism. His website is jakehalpern.com.

March 23: Robin Abrahams and Susan Barr-Toman

2010-02-07T09:52:00.000-05:00

Robin Abrahams writes the popular “Miss Conduct” social advice column for the Boston Globe Sunday magazine. Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners is her first book.
A Cambridge resident with a PhD. in research psychology from Boston University, Robin also works as a research associate at Harvard Business School. Previous jobs include theater publicist, organizational-change communications manager, editor, stand-up comedian, and professor of psychology and writing. She occasionally writes for the science-humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and performs in Improbable Research cabarets.
Robin blogs six days a week at robinabrahams.com and at boston.com/missconduct, and conducts online chats twice a month on boston.com.

Susan Barr-Toman was born and raised in Philadelphia where she still lives with her husband and two children and where she teaches writing at Temple University. When Love Was Clean Underwear, her debut novel, was selected by Ann Hood as the winner of the Many Voices Project's Fiction Prize 2007.
Currently, she’s working on a collection of connected stories called Breathing Water. She just completed Mary Mulgrew, What Did You Do? a children's book with her sister artist Sarah Barr.
Her blog Philly Word of Mouth features information about author readings and events in the Philadelphia area.

February 16: The Wallace Stevens Anthology

2010-01-19T15:11:00.003-05:00

Ordinary Evening takes its name from a poem by Wallace Stevens, so we were thrilled to learn of Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens, edited by Dennis Barone and James Finnegan. This is the first anthology of poems by a full range of poets, inspired by Stevens's life and work. We are fortunate to have five of them read from the collection on February 16th.

Dennis Barone’s recent books are Precise Machine and North Arrow . In 2006 he edited Furnished Rooms , poems by early twentieth-century poet Emanuel Carnevali. He has published a collection of selected poems, and in 1997 he received the America Award in fiction for Echoes. He is Director of American Studies at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut.

James Finnegan has published poems in Ploughshares, Poetry East, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review & other literary magazines. He started an internet discussion list related to contemporary poetry called New-Poetry. He cofounded the web-radio project LitStation.com and he posts aphoristic musings to ursprache, a poetics blog. He lives in West Hartford, CT, and works as an insurance underwriter of financial institutions risk.

Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His poems have been published in such journals as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and Mandorla, as well as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. His book of poems is Let's Not Call it Consequence. With Nancy Kuhl, he edits Phylum Press. He is a lecturer at Yale University and the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading.

Susan Howe is the author of several books including Souls of the Labadie Tract, The Midnight, Kidnapped, The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems, Pierce-Arrow, and Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979. Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History , which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson.

Clare Rossini’s second collection, Lingo, was released in 2006. Her first full-length collection, Winter Morning with Crow, was selected for the 1996 Akron Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, as well as in textbooks and anthologies, including Poets for the New Century, An Introduction to Poetry, and Best American Poetry. Rossini is currently on the faculty of Trinity College in Hartford and the MFA program at Vermont College in Montpelier, VT.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series Spring 2010 Schedule

2010-01-10T12:58:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series announces its line-up for the 2010 Spring season! Join us on ordinary evenings - Tuesday nights - at 7 PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven) for readings from an exciting variety of writers.

January 19: Sheila Kohler and Lisa Siedlarz
February 16: A Tribute to Wallace Stevens, with work by poets including Richard Deming
March 23: Susan Barr-Toman and Robin Abrahams
April 20: Allan Appel and Jake Halpern
May 18: Rebecca Chace and Sven Birkerts

If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com.

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Please join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

January 19th: Sheila Kohler and Lisa Siedlarz

2009-12-29T13:31:00.010-05:00

Lisa Siedlarz's debut poet collection, I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, was published in 2009 by Clemson University Digital Press. Lisa holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Western Connecticut State University. She is the editor of Connecticut River Review and managing editor of Connecticut Review. She has won the John Holmes Poetry Prize and the Leo Connellan Award and was nominated for the 2009 Best New Poets Award. She also facilitated a 16-week writing workshop with Vietnam veterans and edited a collection of their work called The Season of Now. Lisa works for Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven.

Sheila Kohler’s most recent novel, Becoming Jane Eyre, will be published in January 2010 by Viking, Penguin. She has written six other novels: The Perfect Place (1989) ; The House on R Street (1994); Cracks (1999); Children of Pithiviers (June, 2001); Crossways (2004); and Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness (, 2007); and three collections of short stories: Miracles in America (1990); One Girl (1999); and Stories from Another World (2003). Her work has been translated in a variety of languages including Hebrew and Japanese and published widely abroad.

Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a host of top publications. A very abbreviated list includes The Antioch Review, the Yale Review, the Boston Globe, Bomb magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Story. Sheila has received the O.Henry twice, the Open Voice Award, the Smart Family Foundation prize, The Willa Cather Prize, and the Antioch Review Prize. In addition, Sheila was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2003-4.

An acclaimed instructor, Sheila has taught creative writing in many programs such as the Bennington Writing Seminars, City College, The New School, the West Side YMCA, and Columbia's program in Montolieu, France. She currently teaches at Princeton.

December 15: April Bernard and Jude Stewart

2009-11-17T13:13:00.001-05:00

April Bernard is an author and teacher from Bennington, VT. She teaches at Bennington College and at Skidmore College in New York.

Romanticism, April's most recent poetry collection, was published in June 2009. Her prior publications include three books of poetry: Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, and one novel, Pirate Jenny. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books and is included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English and By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. She has also received a Guggenheim Award.

Jude Stewart has written on design, art and culture for Slate, the Believer, I.D., Metropolis, BusinessWeek, Nextbook and Print, as well as a column on color for STEP Inside Design Magazine which she is developing into a book. She has lectured about design at RISD, the Adult Education series in Brooklyn, and the Fachhochschule Mainz in Germany and been interviewed on related topics on NPR's Day to Day and by Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Her introduction to mobile architecture appears in More Mobile: Portable Architecture Today (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

A recipient of the Free University Berlin's European Journalism Fellowship, in 2005 - 2006 she pursued a year-long independent project on the influence of the former East Germany's design on current visual culture in Berlin. Jude divides her time between Berlin, Germany, and New Haven, USA, where she is also co-curator of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series. Read more at www.judestewart.com or follow her daily tweets on color at twitter.com/joodstew.

November 17: Susan McCallum-Smith and Adrienne Kane

2009-10-20T13:09:00.000-04:00

Susan McCallum-Smith is a freelance editor, and writes fiction, non-fiction and reviews. Her work has been featured in, amongst others, Urbanite, The Scottish Review of Books, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Gettysburg Review, and her reviews are often heard on Maryland Public Radio. She received her degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and Bennington College. Her short story collection, Slipping the Moorings, was published in early 2009 by Entasis Press. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and currently lives in Baltimore, USA.

Adrienne Kane's most recent book, Cooking and Screaming, was published in February 2009 by Simon & Schuster. She is also the author and photographer of the popular food blog Nosheteria.com, which has a permanent link on Huffington Post. Adrienne's work as a food writer, recipe developer, and food photographer has appeared in Natural Health, Chow, and Digs, and on FoodandWine.com. Her personal essay, "Bring Tenacity to a Boil: Then Serve" is featured in Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All. She currently lives and cooks in New Haven, CT.

October 20: Debby Applegate and Adam Braver

2009-10-20T10:30:00.000-04:00

Debby Applegate’s first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, was the product of 20 years of research. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best books of 2006.
Debby holds degrees from Amherst and Yale and has taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. She currently teaches a master class on writing biography and memoir at the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She lives in New Haven with her husband, the business writer Bruce Tulgan, and serves on the governing boards of the New Haven Review, the Yale Summer Cabaret and the Friends of the Amherst College Library. Debby is currently researching a cultural biography of Polly Adler, Manhattan's most infamous madam from the 1920s through the 1940s, and whose 1953 autobiography, A House is Not a Home, became a best-selling book and a Hollywood film starring Shelley Winters.

Adam Braver is the author of Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, Divine Sarah, Crows Over the Wheatfield, and November 22, 1963. His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Border’s Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list; and have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and French. His work has appeared in journals such as Daedalus, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Water-Stone Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, West Branch, and Post Road. He is on the faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He also teaches in the Stonecoast MFA, and at the NY State Summer Writers Institute.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Fall 2009 Schedule

2009-08-18T15:05:00.006-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is back for its 2009-2010 season! Join us on orindary evenings - Tuesday nights - at 7 PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven)for readings from a variety of writers.

Our season begins on September 15th with the exciting new novelists Eugenia Kim and Tim Parrish.

We then present:
October 20: Debby Applegate and Adam Braver,
November 17: Susan McCallum Smith and Adrienne Kane,
December 15: April Bernard and Jude Stewart.

If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com.

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Please join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

September 15: Eugenia Kim and Tim Parrish

2009-05-24T13:04:00.002-04:00

Eugenia Kim is the daughter of Korean immigrant parents who came to America shortly after the Pacific War. She has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, and is an MFA graduate of Bennington College. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. The Calligrapher’s Daughter is her first novel.

Tim Parrish is author of Red Stick Men , a collection of stories set in and around his hometown of Baton Rouge. His most recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Cincinnati Review, Idaho Review, Hotel Amerika, and in the anthologies Alive and Awake in the Pelican State (LSU Press) and Louisiana in Words (Pelican Press). He has a story and an essay forthcoming in Maanha, an upcoming on-line journal of North American and Iranian writers. He is currently at work on a memoir, entitled Southern Man, about being raised a racist, fundamentalist Southern Baptist and subsequently becoming involved in street and race violence. He has received a Gerald E. Freund Grant-in-Aid from the Whiting Foundation due to a nomination by the late Ted Solotaroff and has received fellowships through the Connecticut Arts Council and Sewanee Writers Conference. He teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative-writing programs at Southern Connecticut State University.

May 19th: Major Jackson and Lynne Sharon Schwarz

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Major Jackson's books of poems are Hoops (2006, Norton) and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press). He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Poetry, and other literary magazines. Hoops was selected as a finalist for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His third volume of poetry Holding Company is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He took a B.A. from Temple University and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. Mr. Jackson has worked as the curator of literary arts at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia and the Mountain Writers' Center in Portland, and has taught at Columbia University, Xavier University of Louisiana, New York University, and University of Massachusetts - Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence. He lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s most recent book is the memoir, Not Now, Voyager, just out from Counterpoint. Among her 21 books are the novels The Writing on the Wall; In the Family Way, Disturbances in the Field; Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award) and Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award). She is also the author of the poetry collection, In Solitary; the memoir, Ruined by Reading, and, most recently, she edited The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, a collection of essays and interviews. Her work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Essays, and many other anthologies, and her reviews have appeared in leading magazines and newspapers. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Spring 2009 Ordinary Evening Reading Series Schedule

2009-04-22T16:36:00.000-04:00

For Spring 2009, the Ordinary Evening Reading Series is thrilled to present an array of extra-ordinary writers reading on an ordinary Tuesday night at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven).

January 20: Mark Oppenheimer and Barry McCrea
February 17: Susan Holahan and Lewis Robinson
March 24: Douglas Bauer and Lisa Starr
April 21: Ann Hood and Randall Peffer
May 19: Major Jackson and Lynne Sharon Schwarz

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

April 21: Randall Peffer and Ann Hood

2009-03-30T13:18:00.007-04:00

Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of the novel The Knitting Circle and the forthcoming memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Bon Appetit, Traveler, and many more publications. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, The Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.

Randall Peffer has written extensively in genres ranging from nonfiction, travel, and memoir through naval fiction and literary detective novels. His most recent work, Bangkok Dragons, Cape Cod Tears, is the fourth installment of the Cape Islands Mystery series, and in November, he introduced a Civil War naval trilogy with Southern Seahawk. His first publication, Watermen, which described the lives of Chesapeake Bay fishermen, won the Baltimore Sun's Critic's Choice award and was Maryland Book of the Year in 1985. Provincetown Follies/Bangkok Blues, the first of the Cape Islands Mystery series, was a finalist for the Lambda Award. His travel pieces appear in most major metro daily papers, and in magazines like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Reader's Digest, Travel Holiday, Islands, and Sail.

Randy captained the research schooner Sarah Abbot for 14 years, and has also worked as a commercial fisherman. Currently, he teaches literature and writing at Phillips Academy/Andover.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Takes a Summer Break, Returns September 15

2009-03-26T12:28:00.000-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is on Summer Vacation! The 2009-2010 season will begin on September 15th with readers including the exciting new novelist Eugenia Kim, short-story writer Susan McCallum-Smith, poet April Bernard, and many other writers who will move, delight, and entertain you. If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com.

As in the past, our events will occur on Tuesday nights at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven).

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

March 24: Doug Bauer and Lisa Starr

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Douglas Bauer’s books include the novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, and the non-fiction books, Prairie City, Iowa and The Stuff of Fiction. He’s also edited two anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite Television Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. His stories and essays have been appeared in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, Tin House, Agni, and many other magazines. He’s received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Massachusetts Arts Council.

Doug previously worked as a magazine editor and for several years as a free-lance magazine writer. Since 2004, he’s been a professor of English at Bennington College and, starting in 1994, a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Boston with his wife and their two dogs.

Lisa Starr’s latest collection of poems is Mad with Yellow, which was just published. Rhode Island’s poet laureate, she moved to Block Island in 1986 and never wanted to leave. With her husband, Champlin, and their children Orrin and Camille, Lisa owns and operates the Hygeia House. Lisa is a two-time Rhode Island poetry fellowship winner, a basketball coach, and a former college instructor and waitress. Her two previous collections are Days of Dogs and Driftwood (1993) and This Place Here (2001), and her individual works have appeared in journals and publications around the country. Lisa is the founder and director of the Block Island Poetry Project.

February 17: Susan Holahan and Lewis Robinson

2009-01-21T16:41:00.000-05:00

Susan Holahan came to New Haven to study, and stayed. She took a few degrees from Yale then worked as a teacher, a lawyer, a restaurant reviewer, and a newspaper editor as well as a single parent. Her first book of poetry, Sister Betty Reads the Whole You, won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. It bears her photograph of a Whalley Avenue gas station on the cover. She's had poems in American Letters & Commentary, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, The Prose Poem, Sentence, Volt, and many other magazines, as well as The Starving Poets' Cookbook and Off the Record, an anthology of poems by lawyers.

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, winnerof a Whiting Award and the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, and WaterDogs, due out from Random House in January 2009. A graduate of the IowaWriters' Workshop, he teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at theUniversity of Southern Maine and coaches middle-school basketball inPortland, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and dog.

January 20: Barry McCrea and Mark Oppenheimer

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Barry McCrea has taught comparative literature at Yale since 2004. His novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005; Brandon 2008), won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. It was nominated for an American Library Association Stonewall prize and for a Lambda award and was excerpted in the London Independent on Sunday and the Spanish daily El País. The First Verse was published in Spanish as Literati (DestinoLibro, 2007), and in German as Die Poeten der Nacht (Aufbau, 2008). He is currently working on a second academic book on firstness in fiction, provisionally entitled First Novels, Final Farewells.

Mark Oppenheimer, the editor of the New Haven Review (online at newhavenreview.com), writes for the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, The American Scholar, and other publications. He is the author of two books: Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He will be reading from the manuscript of his forthcoming memoir, Wisenheimer: Memories of an Articulate Childhood. He lives in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven, and you can read more about him at markoppenheimer.com.

Yale's (and Ordinary Evening's) Elizabeth Alexander to read at Inauguration!

2008-12-18T22:00:00.001-05:00

For the first time since 1997, a poet will read at the Inauguration. President-elect Barack Obama's Inauguration committee has chosen Elizabeth Alexander, from Yale, to read. We at Ordinary Evening Reading Series are thrilled, not just because millions will get to hear this fabulous poet, but also because we get to hear her again. She read for us on May 15, 2007. So do join us for the Spring 2009 series--you never know, an Inaugural speaker might be there!

December 16th: Charles Barber and Patricia Volk

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Charles Barber is the author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (coming out in paperback in February 2009) and the memoir, Songs from the Black Chair. He was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in New York City shelters for the homeless mentally ill. The title essay of Songs from the Black Chair won a 2006 Pushcart Prize and the book itself received a Connecticut Book Award in 2006. Comfortably Numb was released in 2008 to national media attention, including appearances on The Early Show and Fresh Air. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and Scientific American Mind, among other publications, and on NPR. He has taught nonfiction writing at Wesleyan University. He is a senior administrator at The Connection, an innovative social services agency, and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

Patricia Volk's most recent work is the novel, To My Dearest Friends. She has also written the memoir Stuffed, a novel White Light, and two collections of short stories, All It Takes and The Yellow Banana. She has published stories, book reviews, and essays in dozens of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York, The New Yorker, Playboy, and GQ. She was a weekly columnist for New York Newsday, and lives in New York City.

November 18: Martha Southgate and Elizabeth Edelglass

2008-10-14T10:38:00.000-04:00

Short stories by Elizabeth Edelglass have appeared in journals including Michigan Quarterly Review (winner of the Lawrence Foundation Prize), Lilith (winner of their short story contest), American Literary Review (second prize winner in their short fiction contest), Passages North (nominated for Best New American Voices), New Haven Review, Peregrine, Kalliope, and others. Her story “Floating Away” won the William Saroyan Centennial Prize and is forthcoming in the Saroyan Society journal In The Grove. She has been a Fiction Fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and has been a finalist or semi-finalist for an assortment of national writing awards, including finalist in two Glimmer Train short story contests. She will read a selection from her work in progress, The Same Map, a collection of connected stories that explores inner conflict along with family strife as an extended Jewish American family advances from the immigrant experience in 1924 Newark to assimilated lives in post-9/11 Connecticut, with travels along the way to the Midwest, California, and Hasidic Brooklyn. Elizabeth is the Director of the Department of Jewish Education Library of Greater New Haven, located at the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge.

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left, which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was shortlisted for both the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence. She was the Associate Chair of the Writing Department at Eugene Lang College at New School University and has taught there as well. She now teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Schedule for Fall 2008

2008-09-30T21:36:00.001-04:00

For Fall 2008, the Ordinary Evening Reading Series is thrilled to present an array of extra-ordinary writers reading on an ordinary Tuesday night at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven).

Join us on
September 15 for Eugenia Kim and Tim Parrish
October 20 for Deborah Applegate and Adam Braver
November 17 for Susan McCallum Smith and Adrienne Kane
December 15 for April Bernard and Jude Stewart

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

October 14: Jonathan Spence and Lisa Sanders

2008-09-15T13:34:00.001-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is excited to present non-fiction writers Lisa Sanders and Jonathan Spence on Tuesday October 14 to brighten your Autumn evening with tales of medical deeds (and misdeeds) and life in 17th century China.

Lisa Sanders, M.D. is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and a clinician educator in Yale’s Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency program. She writes the popular "Diagnosis" column which appears monthly in The New York Times Magazine. The popular Fox television show “House M.D.” was inspired by her column and she now serves as a technical advisor for the show. At Yale, Dr. Sanders’ research and practice focus on the treatment of overweight and obese patients and she is the author of The Perfect Fit Diet: How to Lose Weight, Keep it Off And Still Eat the Foods You Love.

Before entering medical school, Lisa was an Emmy Award-winning producer at CBS News, where she covered medicine and health. She is currently writing a book, titled Diagnosis, in which she looks at how doctors make, and sometimes don’t make, the right diagnosis.

Professor Jonathan Spence teaches at Yale in the field of Chinese history from around 1600 to the present, and on Western images of China since the middle ages. His most recent book is Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (2007).

A past president of the American Historical Association, Jonathan is recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Chinese civilization from the 16th century to the present, and has written extensively on the role of history in shaping modern China. His critically acclaimed book The Search for Modern China has become one of the standard texts on the last several hundred years of Chinese history. He has written and published extensively, including a biography of Mao Zedong and Treason by the Book, which explores an intriguing episode of 18th-century history.

A native of England, Spence holds a bachelor's degree from Cambridge University and master's and doctoral degrees from Yale. His many honors include the Los Angeles Times History Prize in 1982, fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and membership to the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1988. In June 2001, he was made a Companion of the Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, an honor given by the Queen of England for outstanding achievement.

September 16: Alice Mattison and Cameron Gearen

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The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is proud to inaugurate its Fall 2008 program with readings by novelist (and Ordinary Evening co-curator) Alice Mattison and poet Cameron Gearen.

Alice Mattison—one of the four organizers of the Ordinary Evening series—will read from her new novel, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, which will be published by HarperCollins on September 16, the day of her reading. An excerpt appeared recently in The New Yorker. Alice’s most recent book, In Case We’re Separated: Connected Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2005 and won the Connecticut Book Award for fiction. She is the author of four other novels and three other collections of stories. She lives in New Haven and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont, and in the Fine Arts Work Center summer workshops in Provincetown, MA.

Cameron Gearen was born in New Haven and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. She has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative to Day that was selected by Robert Pinsky (2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Contest in 2001 and the 2005 Lynda Hull Prize from Crazyhorse. She currently teaches in the English Department at Hamden Hall Country Day School.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is on Summer Vacation

2008-05-21T21:24:00.003-04:00

Hi - We've sent the Reading Series on vacation after a stellar reading by Wally Lamb (see what the New Haven Independent had to say about it here). Our Fall schedule begins on September 16th with readings by our co-curator Alice Mattison and poet Cameron Gearen.

We hope you'll be able to drop by!

May 20: Jason Shinder Poetry Reading and Wally Lamb

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We sadly note the passing in April of Jason Shinder, a gifted poet, gentle soul, and good friend, after a tenacious battle with cancer. For the May 20th event, we will read a few of his poems, and then turn the evening over to Wally Lamb.

Jason Shinder's most recent poetry books are Among Women and Arrow Breaking Apart. A recipient of 2007 poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and elsewhere. His other books include Best American Movie Writing; Writers on Therapy, The Poem That Changed America; "Howl" Fifty Years Later, and the forthcoming The Poem I Turn To: Actors, Directors & other Moviemakers Present Poems That Inspire Them. He was the founder/director of the YMCA National Writer's Voice, YMCA Arts & Humanities, and the Gibson Music International Program, and taught in the graduate writing program at Bennington College. His work within the filmmaking community has included the directing of the Arts Writing Program at Sundance Institute.

Wally Lamb’s third novel, The Hour I First Believed (HarperCollins, forthcoming) explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events as the Civil War, Boston’s 1942 Coconut Grove nightclub fire, and the Columbine High School shootings of 1999. His first two novels, She’s Come Undone (Simon and Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. Wally has also edited the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays that evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present.

A Connecticut native, Wally holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree from Vermont College. He has taught at Norwich Free Academy and the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department’s creative writing program.

Wally has received a host of awards, including the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award and Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He and his wife, Christine, are the parents of three sons, Jared, Justin, and Teddy.

April 29: Ann Hood and Dana Kinstler

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Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of the novel The Knitting Circle and the forthcoming memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Bon Appetit, Traveler, and many more publications. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, The Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.

Dana Kinstler won the Southern Indiana Review’s fiction prize in 2007, and The Missouri Review Editor’s prize in 2000. Her fiction has been published in Salamander Review and the Mississippi Review. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Stella Magazine section of the Sunday London Telegraph, and in the anthologies: My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren and Everyone in Between, Mr. Wrong, About Face, and Feed Me. She grew up in New York City and now lives in the Hudson River Valley, New York with her husband and two daughters.

Ordinary Evening Schedule for Spring 2008

2008-03-23T21:29:00.000-04:00

The Spring 2008 Ordinary Evening Reading Series continues, with an array of extra-ordinary writers reading on an ordinary Tuesday night at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven). Join us on
January 22 for Joshua Beckman and Vivian Shipley
February 26 for Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl
March 25 for Rachel Pastan and Jack Hitt
April 29 for Ann Hood and Dana Kinstler
May 20 for Jason Schinder and Wally Lamb

We'll see you there --

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Presents Nonfiction Writer Jack Hitt and Novelist Rachel Pastan, Tuesday March. 25, 7PM

2008-03-05T13:01:00.004-05:00

Get an early taste of spring with fresh new works by award-winning journalist Jack Hitt and novelist Rachel Pastan on Tuesday, March 25, 7pm, at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs), 272 College Street at Chapel.

"I guess most of us are condemned to see nothing more than the easy comedy of chickens. But Susan Vitucci saw something else: their potential greatness. Their hidden beauty. Their grandeur."

- from "Chicken Diva", about an opera based on Chicken Little, This American Life by Jack Hitt

"'She wants to nurse,' Jane said.

'Didn't you just nurse her?' Laura asked, handing the baby back.Jane felt a sting, as though Laura had criticized her. What did Laura, with her thin bra strap and her round recreational breasts know about anything?

'Her stomach is the size of a walnut,' she said lightly, lifting her shirt...She was glad to have Maisie back in her arms where she belonged. Nothing was sweeter than holding her daughter, except for all the times she longed to put her down."

- from Lady of the Snakes, by Rachel Pastan

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the public radio program, This American Life. Recently, his work was chosen by Jamaica Kincaid for inclusion in Best American Travel Essays and by Atul Gawande for Best American Science Writing. His radio program for This American Life entitled "Habeas Schmabeas" won the 2007 Peabody Award.

Harcourt published Rachel Pastan's second novel, Lady of the Snakes, in January. Her first novel, This Side of Married (Viking), appeared in 2004 and was recognized by the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. A former Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellow, she currently teaches at Swarthmore College and the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives with her family near Philadelphia. For more information, please visit her website: http://www.rachelpastan.com/.

Ordinary Evening's remaining Spring 2008 lineup features writers from the "Mr. Wrong" Anthology, Ann Hood and Dana Kinstler (4/29); and novelist Wally Lamb with poet Jason Shinder (5/20). Please join us! Read writers' biographies, find links, send us an email, and more at http://ordinaryevening.blogspot.com/.

ABOUT THE ORDINARY EVENING SERIES
Started in spring 2005, Ordinary Evening features writers in a monthly reading at the Anchor Bar Mermaid Room, downstairs. Borrowing its name from the poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" by Wallace Stevens, the series aims to bring writers and audiences together in a no-fuss, informal environment in the Elm City to enjoy a little written word on a work-night. Readings are always on a Tuesday at 7pm, free of charge, both drinkers and teetotalers welcome.

Poets Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl Read on Tuesday, February 26

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ORDINARY EVENING READING SERIES PRESENTS
POETS RICHARD DEMING AND NANCY KUHL
Tuesday, February 26, 7pm

Join us for an unconventional Valentine's Day celebration with a reading from poets (and married couple) Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl on Tuesday, February 26, 7pm, at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs), 272 College Street at Chapel.

Choose this place, its dogged vacancies
and when someone walks in, here begins:
the distance pressed, the minute before grew an inch,
now closer in--arms and legs shoot out so
the body is an x, a beckoning.
How's that for sincerity?...

- from "Rooms (1)" by Richard Deming

I am. I am. Falling. Like the downward
stroke of a paintbrush, like a river turned
cataract. People who fall

find each other by bends where
bones didn't heal right, by scabs,
by swellings and scars...
- from "Pyramid" by Nancy Kuhl

Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His first book of poems is Let's Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008). He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford University Press, 2008). With Nancy Kuhl he edits Phylum Press.

Nancy Kuhl is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Wife of the Left Hand (Shearsman Books, 2007). Her chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines.

She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where she curates the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series. She is the author of two exhibition catalogs, Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts and Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women, which are distributed by the University Press of New England.

March 25: Rachel Pastan and Jack Hitt

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Harcourt published Rachel Pastan’s second novel, Lady of the Snakes, in January. Her first novel, This Side of Married (Viking), appeared in 2004 and was recognized by the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. A former Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow, she currently teaches at Swarthmore College and the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives with her family near Philadelphia. For more information, and to read Chapter One of her novel, please visit her website: www.rachelpastan.com.

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the public radio program, This American Life. Recently, his work was chosen by Jamaica Kincaid for inclusion in Best American Travel Essays and by Atul Gawande for Best American Science Writing. His radio program for This American Life entitled "Habeas Schmabeas" won the 2007 Peabody Award.

January 22: Joshua Beckman and Vivian Shipley

2008-01-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of five books, including Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

Vivian Shipley is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and the editor of Connecticut Review from Southern Connecticut State University. She has published five chapbooks and her seventh book of poems, Hardboot: Poems New & Old, (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2005) won the 2006 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2006 Connecticut Press Club Prize for Best Creative Writing. She has won a vast number of prizes, and two of her poetry collections have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2007, she was inducted into the University of Kentucky Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame. A new book of poetry, All of Your Message Have Been Erased, is forthcoming from Southeastern Louisiana University Press.

What They Say About Ordinary Evening

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The attached article discusses the November 2006 Ordinary Evening readings -- check our listings for Spring 2008 to see what's coming up!

February 26: Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl

2008-01-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His first book of poems is Let's Not Call It Consequence(Shearsman, 2008). He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford University Press, 2008). With Nancy Kuhl he edits Phylum Press.

Nancy Kuhl is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Wife of the Left Hand (Shearsman Books, 2007). Her chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines.

She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where she curates the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series. She is the author of two exhibition catalogs, Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts and Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women, which are distributed by the University Press of New England.

December 11: Rob Ackerman and Tom Gavin

2007-11-19T21:35:00.000-05:00

Rob Ackerman (Playwright) wrote Tabletop (2001 Drama Desk Award Winner for Best Ensemble Performance) and Disconnect (produced in 2005 by The Working Theater at Classic Stage Company). His first play, Origin of the Species, was made into an award-winning feature film starring Amanda Peet. Rob and his wife, author Carol Weston, live on the Upper West side with their daughters Emme and Lizzi and a cat named Mike.

Thomas Gavin is the author of three novels. Breathing Water, which won the Lillian Fairchild Award; The Last Film of Emile Vico; and Kingkill, named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and an “Editor’s Choice” by Time Magazine. His essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Best American Essays, and other publications, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An excerpt from his novel in progress, Bridge of Lost Boys, appeared in Icarus: New Writing from Around the World. An emeritus professor of English at The University of Rochester, Gavin has taught at Middlebury College and Delta College, and at a number of writing seminars. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Tuesday, November 13: Judith Baumel and Martha Cooley

2007-10-28T21:15:00.000-04:00

ORDINARY EVENING READING SERIES
WELCOMES JUDITH BAUMEL AND MARTHA COOLEY
Tuesday, November 13, 7-8pm

The Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs)
272 College Street at Chapel, (203) 865-1512

“About that head scarf I saw fluttering brightly
in a bright room across the distance
of corridors as if it were a movie or a strong
dream.. .”

writes poet Judith Baumel, a poet, critic and translator. She is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. A former director of the Poetry Society of America, her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Now. Her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Martha Cooley’s most recent novel begins, “Think of me as real. . .” She’s the author of The Archivist, a national bestseller, and Thirty-Three Swoons (both published by Little, Brown). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a member of the English Department at Adelphi University. Though she’s pretty amazing, we think of her as real.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS
This season's lineup offers an eclectic mix of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and drama from local and further-flung writers. The final reading of the Fall season, on Tuesday, December 11, will present novelist Tom Gavin and playwright Robert Ackerman. For biographies, links to work, and other information, visit http://ordinaryevening.blogspot.com/.

ABOUT THE ORDINARY EVENING SERIES
Started in spring 2005, the Ordinary Evening Reading Series features both emerging and established writers in a monthly reading at the Anchor Bar Mermaid Room, downstairs. Borrowing its name from the poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" by Wallace Stevens, the series aims to bring writers and audiences together in a no-fuss, informal environment to enjoy a little storytelling on a work-night. Readings are always on a Tuesday at 7pm, free of charge, both drinkers and teetotalers welcome.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series Schedule for Fall 2007

2007-10-26T18:18:00.000-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series was created to bring emerging and established poets and writers to New Haven, and to enrich the already robust artistic, cultural, and literary scene in the Elm City. The readings always take place on a Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room, downstairs at 272 College Street in New Haven. For now, you’ll have to settle for one reading a month. Seating is limited so get there early! If you have a question about the reading series, please email
curator.ordinaryevening @gmail.com

If you’d like to receive announcements about upcoming readings, please email
news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

Here’s the reading schedule through December 2007. Click on the links to learn more about the readers and visit this site frequently for updates and news:

September 18 Marilyn Nelson and Sarah Pemberton Strong
October 16 Laura M. MacDonald and Amy Bloom
November 13 Judith Baumel and Martha Cooley
December 11 Robert Ackerman and Tom Gavin.

November 13: Judith Baumel and Martha Cooley

2007-10-25T17:23:00.000-04:00

Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. She is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. A former director of the Poetry Society of America, her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Now. Her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Martha Cooley is the author of The Archivist, a national bestseller, and Thirty-Three Swoons (both published by Little, Brown). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a member of the English Department at Adelphi University.

October 16: Laura M. Macdonald and Amy Bloom

2007-09-12T16:47:00.000-04:00

Laura M. Macdonald's most recent book, Curse of the Narrows, won the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Prize, and the John W. Dafoe Prize. It was also featured as Barnes and Noble New Voices selection. She is the co-author of one novel. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she now lives in New York. Her website is Laura M. Macdonald.com.

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays. She's been nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

September 18: Marilyn Nelson and Sarah Pemberton Strong

2007-08-01T14:42:00.000-04:00

The Fall season of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series begins with a pair of exciting writers: former Connecticut poet laureate Marilyn Nelson and novelist and poet Sarah Pemberton Strong.

Poet Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks. Her books have won many honors, including three finalist honors for the National Book Award, the Poets' Prize, the Boston Globe/Hornbook Award, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, one Newbery and two Coretta Scott King honors, finalist honors for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the American Scandinavian Society Translation Prize, and the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut; founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony; and the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001 through 2006.

Sarah Pemberton Strong is the author of a novel, Burning the Sea, which was on the Boston Globe Top 10 bestseller list in 2002. Her poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Atlanta Review, The Sun and elsewhere. She teaches poetry workshops at Arts and Literature Lab in New Haven and is currently completing her second novel, The Fainting Room. Her website is www.sarahpembertonstrong.com.

In Memoriam, Liam Rector, Poet, Educator, and Friend

2007-06-17T17:10:00.000-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series sadly notes the passing of Liam Rector, poet and educator, on August 15. Liam published three volumes of poetry: The Sorrow of Architecture (Dragon Gate, 1984); American Prodigal (Story Line, 1994); and The Executive Director of the Fallen World (University of Chicago, 2006), in addition to editing The Day I Was Older: The Poetry of Donald Hall and co-editing with Tree Swenson, On the Poetry of Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page. Along with teaching at Columbia University, the New School University, Emerson College and elsewhere, he founded the Bennington College Writing Seminars program in 1994 and served as its executive director until the time of his death. He touched thousands of lives through his teaching and writing and will be sorely missed.

The Anchor Bar & Restaurant

2007-06-01T23:10:00.000-04:00

This is a review of the Anchor from the local bar & restaurant guide The Menu (http://www.newhavenmenu.com/):

The dive bar to end all dive bars, equally beloved by locals and students for its time-frozen charm

Traditional American cuisine
Located near the Green in New Haven’s Theatre District
$11 average price for a meal and drink

Overall rating: 6.5/10
Food: 5.7/10
Atmosphere: 9.0/10
Attitude: 4.0/10
Value: 7.0/10

Full bar
No credit cards accepted

For a real drink at a real bar, any night you please, the Anchor is the obvious choice—we might say the only choice. There may be no better-preserved, no more self-consciously hip postwar watering hole in New Haven. And no local bar is such a perennial and reliable crowd-pleaser. In the very heart of town, this is the beloved favorite of generations of Taft residents, law and grad students, and just about everyone else in New Haven with a taste for kitsch, cheap beer, a wink, and a smile. The Anchor serves passable, well-priced comfort food at lunchtime: burgers and traditional American classics like liver, bacon, and onions (yeah!). But the Anchor comes into its own during the post-school hours, as the crowd slowly starts to assemble.
Fast-forward seven hours. It’s packed. The last shift of Roomba and Union League kitchen staff sidles up to the bar. Regulars have commandeered their usual tables, and the jukebox is stacked with classics. Grad students squirm in their plastic booths, sitting knee to knee in observance of some irrational fire code prohibiting more comfortable configurations. Gone, sadly, are the $1.75 bottles of Schaefer’s on Mondays; they’ve been replaced by cans of Rheingold, another nostalgic American beer. “How’s the Rheingold?” we asked our server one day. “Terrible,” he answered. So of course we had to order one. Right he was—it tasted like sweetened dishwashing detergent.
The bartenders turn into psychotic last last-call drill sergeants at the untimely hour of 12:45. (Anchor closes a little early. Always. Even the clock on the wall is fast.) As regulars whine and guzzle while intimidated novices file out obediently, the jukebox calmly spins its classic tunes. Life is as it should be at the Anchor, and we only wish that the soundtrack could follow us home.

Time for Summer Break, But Come Back in September!

2007-05-16T13:08:00.000-04:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series will resume on September 18th at 7 PM in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (272 College St., New Haven) with poets Marilyn Nelson and Liam Rector. Keep checking this site for additional information on these and our other fall readers, which include non-fiction writer Laura Macdonald, and novelists Amy Bloom, Judy Baumel, Martha Cooley, and Tom Gavin, among others.

Have a wonderful summer with many blissful ordinary evenings spent reading!

May 15: Lloyd Schwartz and Elizabeth Alexander

2007-05-01T15:23:00.000-04:00

May 15th brings mayflowers and a pair of poets to the Ordinary Evening Reading Series, at 7PM in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room at 272 College Street in New Haven. Lloyd Schwarz, a poet, professor, music critic, and Elizabeth Bishop expert, will be reading with Elizabeth Alexander, Yale professor, poet, and recent winner of the inaugural Jackson Poetry Prize.

Lloyd Schwartz is the author of three books of poems, most recently Cairo Traffic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his columns about classical music and dance in the Boston Phoenix and is also a regular commentator about classical music for NPR’s Fresh Air. He has written extensively about Elizabeth Bishop and is currently co-editing her collected works for the Library of America. Dr. Schwartz lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at The University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, American Sublime (Graywolf Press, 2005), which was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize; The Venus Hottentot (Graywolf Press, reissued 2004); Antebellum Dream Book (Graywolf Press, 2001); and Body of Life (Tia Chucha, 1997). She is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior (Graywolf Press, 2003). She has read her work across the U.S. and in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, and her poetry, short stories, and critical prose have been published in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. A professor at Yale University , Dr. Alexander lives in New Haven, Connecticut and also serves on the faculty of Cave Canem Poetry Workshop in the summer.

May 1: "Your Favorite Poem" Night

2007-04-23T20:02:00.000-04:00

In the spirit that “Every Month is Poetry Month”, we invite you to gather a favorite poem and read aloud with us on Tuesday, May 1, 7PM. Old or new, famous or obscure, stuff you’ve written yourself – we welcome all comers. All we ask is that you limit your contribution to one poem that is less than five minutes long, so that everyone gets a chance to read. See you on May Day!

April 17: Novelists Chandra Prasad and Sheila Kohler Read in the Ordinary Evening Series

2007-04-02T13:13:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, April 17th, The Ordinary Evening Reading Series proudly presents two fiction writers, New Haven native Chandra Prasad and O. Henry-award winning novelist Sheila Kohler. As always, the reading will start at 7 PM in the Mermaid Room, downstairs at the Anchor Bar, 272 College St. in New Haven.

Chandra Prasad's writing explores themes of identity and belonging. Inspired by lore and legend, her book Death of a Circus is a dark tale that centers around a young man who dreams of making a name for himself as a high-wire walker. Tom Perrotta says it is “narrated with Dickensian verve, a keen eye for historical detail, and lots of heart.” Prasad is the editor of—and a contributor to—Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience (W.W. Norton), which features original work by Danzy Senna and Ruth Ozeki, among others. She is also the author of Outwitting the Job Market as well as dozens of articles on diversity and the workplace. Her novel On Borrowed Wings, about a girl who attends Yale University in the 1930s in the guise of a boy, will be published by Atria (Simon & Schuster) in June. Chandra lives in Connecticut with her husband, son, and an iguana named Green Bean.

Sheila Kohler has just published Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness (Other Press, April 2007), an account of an 18th century French noblewoman who left Revolutionary France and became a successful dairy farmer in Massachusetts. She is the author of five other novels: The Perfect Place,(Knopf,1989) The House on R Street, (Knopf, 1994) Cracks (Zoland,1999) Children of Pithiviers, (Zoland, June, 2001) and Crossways(The Ontario Review Press, October 2004), and three collections of short stories: Miracles in America,(Knopf, 1990) One Girl (Helicon Nine, 1999) and Stories from Another World (2003, Ontario Review Press).

Kohler has been awarded the O.Henry, (1988), the Open Voice Award(1991), The Willa Cather Prize for One Girl(1998), the Smart Family Foundation prize (October, 2000) and the Antioch Review Prize, (2004). She was a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library in 2003/4 and teaches at Bennington and Brooklyn College.

Sandi Kahn Shelton and Joyce Peseroff Read on March 27th

2007-03-05T15:19:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series welcomes novelist/humorist Sandi Kahn Shelton and poet Joyce Peseroff to the Anchor Bar on Tuesday, March 27th at 7 PM.

Sandi Kahn Shelton's second novel, A Piece of Normal, has just appeared in paperback. Sandi, a transplant to the New Haven area, always meant to move back to California but instead discovered she could live without the Pacific Ocean much more easily than she could do without clam apizza, snow days, and all the writers who live in this little 19-square mile area. Although by the age of five, she envisioned a smooth-running literary career for herself after she sold a story to her neighbors for 20 cents (the cost of a banana popsicle), she's discovered since then that the writing life, while mostly fun, isn't just about acquiring frozen desserts. She is the author of three non-fiction humor books about parenting--books that boast of offering absolutely NO viable parenting advice except "just try to make it from day to day." A feature writer and former humor columnist for the New Haven Register, she's the author of two novels, What Comes After Crazy and A Piece of Normal, and is currently at work on a third. She also maintains a blog at her website, www.sandishelton.com.

Joyce Peseroff's four books of poems are The Hardness Scale, A Dog in the Lifeboat, Mortal Education, and Eastern Mountain Time (Carnegie Mellon University Press). She is the editor of The Ploughshares Poetry Reader, Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, and, most recently, Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Recent poems and reviews appear in Margie, Memorious, Ploughshares, Salamander, Slate, and The Women's Review of Books. She has received grants for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is Director of Creative Writing and the new MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series Spring Season

2007-03-04T20:31:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series was created to bring emerging and established poets and writers to New Haven, and to enrich the already robust artistic, cultural, and literary scene in the Elm City. The readings always take place on a Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room. For now, you’ll have to settle for one reading a month. Seating is limited so get there early! If you have a question about the reading series, please email
curator.ordinaryevening@gmail.com If you’d like to receive announcements about upcoming readings, please email
news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com Here’s the reading schedule through May 2007. Click on the links to learn more about the readers and visit this site frequently for updates and news:

January 23 April Bernard and Roya Hakakian
February 27 Fred Dillen and Deirdre Bair
March 27 Sandi Shelton and Joyce Peseroff
April 17 Chandra Prasad and Sheila Kohler
May 15 Elizabeth Alexander and Lloyd Schwartz.

Fred Dillen and Deirdre Bair to Read on February 27

2007-02-14T15:27:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, February 27th, novelist Frederick Dillen and biographer/non-fiction writer Deirdre Bair will read as part of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series.

Frederick G. Dillen is the author of two novels, Hero-which was named the best first novel of its year by the Dictionary of Literary Biography-and Fool. A new novel has been optioned in manuscript by an independent film producer. Fred has won an O.Henry Award and has taught at Harvard and Emerson College. He lives in Cambridge with the playwright and performer Leslie Harrell Dillen. They have two grown daughters and a heartbreakingly old yellow dog with large ears.

Deirdre Bair’s most recent book, Calling it Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over, has just been published by Random House. She is also the author of four biographies: Samuel Beckett (winner of the National Book Award); Simone de Beauvoir (NY Times "Best Books of the Year"; finalist: Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Anaïs Nin (NY Times "Notable Books of the Year," BBC Arts 4 documentary); and Jung: A Biography (NY Times “Notable Books of the Year,” Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, winner of the NAAP Gradiva Award for Best Biography of the Year).

Deirdre has been a literary journalist and tenured university professor with a specialty in comparative literature and culture, and has held fellowships and grants from many prestigious organizations, including the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. She has also been a visiting professor and writer in residence all over the world, and most recently, at Bennington College. She divides her time between New York and New Haven, Connecticut.

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series Introduces January Readers: April Bernard and Roya Hakakian

2007-01-01T20:19:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series begins its 2007 season with poet April Bernard and novelist Roya Hakakian, appearing on January 23 at 7 PM in The Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room. Check this site frequently for announcements of the balance of our season, which will feature playwrights, poets, and novelists, including novelist Fred Dillen and poet Lloyd Schwartz.
April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose most recent collection of poems is Swan Electric. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Agni, The Southwest Review, and many other magazines. She has received the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Sidney Harmon Fellowship, and an award in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation. April Bernard teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont. She will read from her forthcoming collection, In a Stolen Boat.

Roya Hakakian’s memoir, Journey from the Land of No– about a girlhood in revolutionary Iran– recently won the Connecticut Book Award; The Washington Post called it a “moving narrative” that “swings from funny to sad.” She is a former associate producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes and a documentary filmmaker, as well as the author of two acclaimed volumes of poetry in Persian and a contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Gabriel Gudding and Rosanna Warren Read on December 19th

2006-12-11T21:53:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series closes out 2006 with readings by two terrific poets, Gabriel Gudding and Rosanna Warren, on December 19th at 7pm in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (downstairs at 272 College St., New Haven). We hope you'll take some time from the busy holiday season and join us.

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and rhode island notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming 2008), which was written entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence, Rhode Island and Normal, Illinois. A resident of Normal, Illinois since 2002, he's an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Illinois State University, teaching "experimental poetry." Gabriel's work has appeared in such venues as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and has been anthologized in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He is a trained mediator for Illinois State, has begun two creative writing programs in prisons, and maintains a blog, Conchology.

Rosanna Warren was born in Connecticut in 1953. She was educated at Yale (BA 1976) and Johns Hopkins (MA 1980). She is the author of one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981), and three collections of poems: Each Leaf Shines Separate (Norton, 1984), Stained Glass (Norton, 1993), and Departure (Norton, 2003). She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voice from the Field (Northeastern, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With her husband, Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides' Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1992). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Readers? Digest Fund, among others. Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets' Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004-2005 she was president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. She is Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Brings You a Special Gift: Two December Readings!

2006-11-14T18:36:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is celebrating the holiday season with two readings in December, on the 5th and the 19th. Both will occur at 7pm downstairs at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room (272 College St., New Haven). December 5th features three poets: Bruce Covey, P.F. Potvin, and Reb Livingston. Two more poets, the experimental poet Gabriel Gudding and the noted Rosanna Warren, will read on December 19th.

Bruce Covey is Lecturer of Creative Writing at Emory University and the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and the forthcoming Ten Pins, Ten Frames (Front Room, Michigan) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books). His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming in 26, Verse, LIT, Bombay Gin, Boog City, 580 Split, and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series in Atlanta.

Michigander P.F. Potvin is a writer, musician, and ultra-marathon runner. His prosy book, The Attention Lesson, which chronicles adventures in Patagonia, New Zealand, Europe and the U.S., is forthcoming from No Tell Press. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he received the Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship. Other scholarships include the Vermont Studio Center and the Catskill Poetry Conference. His writing has appeared in Born Magazine, Boston Review, Sentence, Black Warrior Review, Pierogi Press, and No Tell Motel. He also serves on the editorial board of Drunken Boat.

Reb Livingston is the author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, forthcoming) and Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2006 and literary magazines. Along with Carly Sachs, she curates the Washington DC-based reading series, Lolita and Gilda's Burlesque Poetry Hour.

A Brace of Poets for November 7th's Ordinary Evening Reading Series

2006-10-19T17:14:00.000-04:00

In the bracing November air, please join the Ordinary Evening Reading Series on Tuesday, November 7, at 7pm, downstairs at the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room (272 College St, New Haven) to hear two exciting poets from both coasts.

Ed Skoog's poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Slate, and other journals in the U.S. and England. He has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, and in 2005 won the William Faulkner Prize for Poetry from the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Society in New Orleans. He lives in southern California.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of This Body of Silk, which won the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, The Wedding Boat (Owl Creek Press), as well as The Leaving: New and Selected Poems and The Golden Hour, both published by Autumn House; she is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. She has been a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Visiting Writer at Central Connecticut State University, and Poet-in-Residence at SUNY Binghamton and at the Frost place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her poetry has been widely anthologized including in Garrison Keillor's nationally syndicated radio show Writer's Almanac. Formerly of Mystic, Connecticut, she has just moved to Maryland, where she works as a writer and editor.

October 3rd: Short-Story Writer Paul Beckman and Poet Jen Tynes Read at The Anchor Bar

2006-09-25T10:20:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday October 3rd at 7:00 PM, please join the Ordinary Evening Reading Series to welcome fiction writer Paul Beckman and poet Jen Tynes to the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room.

Paul Beckman is a writer who lives in Madison, CT. His short stories, four of which have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, have appeared in both print and on-line journals (among them, Playboy, Currents, Connecticut Review, Mad Hatter's Review, and Exquisite Corpse). His first collection, Come! Meet My Family and Other Stories was published in 1995 by Weighted Anchor Press, and a second volume is expected in 2006. Paul's work has been published in New Zealand, translated into German for an anthology entitled Humor by Jewish Writers ("The P Word"), and several of his short stories have been adapted into plays.

Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits horse less press. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Diagram, CutBank, H_NGM_N, Typo, Octopus, Verse, No Tell Motel, The Cultural Society, and other journals. Her first book, The End Of Rude Handles, is available from Red Morning Press.

12/19: Gabriel Gudding & Rosanna Warren

2006-09-15T00:12:00.000-04:00

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and rhode island notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming 2008), which was written entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence, Rhode Island and Normal, Illinois. A resident of Normal, Illinois since 2002, he's an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Illinois State University, teaching "experimental poetry." Gudding's work has appeared in such venues as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and has been anthologized in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He is a trained mediator for Illinois State, has begun two creative writing programs in prisons, and maintains a blog, Conchology.

Rosanna Warren is the author of Departure (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003); Stained Glass (1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984); and Snow Day (1981). She has also published a translation of Euripides's Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995) and edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989). Her many awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the May Sarton Prize, among others, and she received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was The New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the poetry editor of Daedalus. Currently, she is the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.

2006 Ordinary Evening Schedule

2006-09-14T18:11:00.000-04:00

curator.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

If you’d like to receive announcements about upcoming readings, please email

news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com

Here’s the reading schedule through 2006. Click on the links to learn more about the readers and visit this site frequently for updates and news:

12/5
Bruce Covey, P.F. Potvin, & Reb Livingston

12/19
Gabriel Gudding and Rosanna Warren

Past Readers:

11/7
Ed Skoog and Sue Ellen Thompson

10/3
Jen Tynes and Paul Beckman

9/19
Shanna Compton, Jennifer L. Knox, and Ada Limón

August - Vacation!

7/18
Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, and Shafer Hall

6/20
Edward Schwarzschild and Laurel Snyder

5/16
Robin Beth Schaer and Ravi Shankar

4/18
David Amsden and Tom Bissell

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series resumes on September 19 at the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room with Shanna Compton, Ada Limón, and Jennifer L. Knox

2006-09-12T10:44:00.000-04:00

Please join us on Tuesday, September 19, at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room for the next installment of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series, featuring the following excellent poets:

Shanna Compton is the author of Down Spooky (poems, Winnow, 2005) and the editor of GAMERS (essays on video games, Soft Skull, 2004). Her poems can be found in Foursquare, Ping-Pong, the tiny, Tool, Abraham Lincoln, and other magazines, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2005, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, and Bowery Women.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. Her first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book This Big Fake World was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize and is due out in the fall. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jennifer L. Knox was born and raised in Lancaster, California, the largestcity named Lancaster in the world. Her first book of poems, A Gringo LikeMe, is available on Softskull Press. She is a three-time contributor to The Best American Poetry, and her work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present. She is currently studying avian linguistics via correspondence.

7/18: Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, and Shafer Hall

2006-07-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

Please join us on Tuesday, July 18, at 7:00 p.m. in the Anchor Bar’s Mermaid Room for the next installment of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series, featuring the following excellent poets:

Samuel Amadon is from Hartford. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, New England Review, Verse and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Advice for Young Couples from H_ng M_n B__ks. He will be a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2006-2007.

Stephanie Anderson was born in Berkeley, California and raised (mostly) in Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago. In the Particular Particular was the winner of the 2006 Diagram chapbook contest and will be published by New Michigan Press in the fall. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo. She lives in New York City.

Shafer Hall is a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and is the curator of the Frequency Reading Series. Some of his chapbooks have been published by Rust Buckle and Half Empty/Half Full. Some more will be published by Big Game and B54. His first full-length book, Never Cry Woof, will be published in January by No Tell Press. He is only a spearfisherman in his wildest dreams.

12/5: Bruce Covey, P.F. Potvin, & Reb Livingston

2006-03-15T00:11:00.000-05:00

Bruce Covey is Lecturer of Creative Writing at Emory University and the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and the forthcoming Ten Pins, Ten Frames (Front Room, Michigan) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books). His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming from 26, Verse, LIT, Bombay Gin, Boog City, 580 Split, and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series in Atlanta.

Michigander P.F. Potvin is a writer, musician, and ultra-marathon runner. His prosy book, The Attention Lesson, which chronicles adventures in Patagonia, New Zealand, Europe and the U.S., is forthcoming from No Tell Press. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he received the Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship. Other scholarships include the Vermont Studio Center and the Catskill Poetry Conference. His writing has appeared in Born Magazine, Boston Review, Sentence, Black Warrior Review, Pierogi Press, and No Tell Motel. He also serves on the editorial board of Drunken Boat.

Reb Livingston is the author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, forthcoming) and Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2006 and literary magazines. Along with Carly Sachs, she curates the Washington DC-based reading series, Lolita and Gilda's Burlesque Poetry Hour.

11/7: Ed Skoog & Sue Ellen Thompson

2006-03-15T00:09:00.000-05:00

Ed Skoog’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Plougshares, The New Republic, and NO: A Journal of the Arts. A limited edition collection of poems, Field Recordings, was published in 2004 by Seattle’s Lit Rag Press. He recently moved from New Orleans to southern California.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of This Body of Silk, which won the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, and The Wedding Boat (Owl Creek Press), as well as The Leaving: New and Selected Poems and The Golden Hour, both published by Autumn House; she is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. She has been a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Visiting Writer at Central Connecticut State University, and Poet-in-Residence at SUNY Binghamton and at the Frost place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her poetry has been widely anthologized including in Garrison Keillor's nationally syndicated radio show Writer's Almanac. Formerly of Mystic, Connecticut, she recently moved to Maryland, where she works as a writer and editor.

10/3: Aaron Belz and Jen Tynes

2006-03-15T00:07:00.000-05:00

Aaron Belz is a PhD candidate in English Literature at St. Louis University. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, McSweeney’s, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jacket, Fence, and the Verse Press Younger American Poets anthology. A full-length manuscript, A Place Where Things Are, was shortlisted for University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham Poetry Prize. His poetry chapbook Plausible Words was published in 2005. Visit his website at belz.net and read some of his recent poetry at www.meaningless.com.

Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits horse less press. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Diagram, CutBank, H_NGM_N, Typo, Octopus, Verse, No Tell Motel, The Cultural Society, and other journals. Her first book, The End Of Rude Handles, is available from Red Morning Press.

9/19: Shanna Compton, Jennifer L. Knox, and Ada Limón

2006-03-15T00:06:00.000-05:00

Shanna Compton is not quite as tall as Jennifer L. Knox but she is the author of Down Spooky and the editor of GAMERS: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. Her poems have recently appeared in Spork, The Tiny, Court Green, and the anthologies The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Digerati, and The Best American Poetry 2005. Originally from Texas, she has lived in Brooklyn, NY, since 1995. Please visit her online at www.shannacompton.com.

Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to The Best American Poetry series, as well as the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Her first book of poems, A Gringo Like Me, is available from Soft Skull Press.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including The Iowa Review, Slate, Watchword, Poetry Daily, Tarpaulin Sky, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others. Her first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book This Big Fake World was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize and is due out in the fall. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her new bike and doesn’t have any tattoos.

7/18: Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, and Shafer Hall

2006-03-15T00:03:00.000-05:00

Samuel Amadon is from Hartford. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, New England Review, Verse and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Advice for Young Couples from H_ng M_n B__ks. He will be a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2006-2007.

Stephanie Anderson was born in Berkeley, California and raised (mostly) in Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago. In the Particular Particular was the winner of the 2006 Diagram chapbook contest and will be published by New Michigan Press in the fall. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo. She lives in New York City.

Shafer Hall is a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and is the curator of the Frequency Reading Series. Some of his chapbooks have been published by Rust Buckle and Half Empty/Half Full. Some more will be published by Big Game and B54. His first full-length book, Never Cry Woof, will be published in January by No Tell Press. He is only a spearfisherman in his wildest dreams.

6/20: Edward Schwarzschild and Laurel Snyder

2006-03-15T00:02:00.000-05:00

Edward Schwarzschild is the author of Responsible Men (Algonquin, 2005), a first novel which received wide acclaim, and was chosen as one of 20 Breakout Books by Amazon.com, 25 Best Books for Book Groups by Kirkus and one of the Best Books of 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle. His next book, a collection of short stories entitled No Rest for the Middleman, will be published by Algonquin in 2007.

Schwarzschild’s fiction and essays have been published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Forward, The Chicago Tribune, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Moment Magazine, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. He was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and he now teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he holds a joint appointment in the English department and the New York State Writers Institute. Learn more about Schwarzschild and his work by visiting www.responsiblemen.com.

Laurel Snyder is the author of a poetry chapbook, Daphne & Jim, and editor of the anthology Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her rants can be found in the Utne Reader, LIT, the Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” as well as the webzine, Killing the Buddha, where she is co-editor.

5/16: Robin Beth Schaer and Ravi Shankar

2006-03-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

Please join us on Tuesday, May 16 for the second installment of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series:

Robin Beth Schaer is the Queen of Birds and a third-generation New Yorker. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Rattapallax, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Painted Bride Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Barrow Street. She is the chief online editor at the Academy of American Poets and has taught literature and writing at Columbia University and Cooper Union.

Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in May 2004 and named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards. His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Ambit, Catamaran and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among other publications. He has served as a commentator for NPR, and appeared on KKUP and Wesleyan radio. He currently reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry, due out in Fall 2007. You can read an interview with him at Jacket. He does not play the sitar.

4/18: David Amsden and Tom Bissell

2006-03-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series welcomes David Amsden and Tom Bissell on Tuesday, April 18 at 7:00 p.m. as the first readers in the series:

David Amsden is the author of the novel Important Things That Don’t Matter. His fiction and nonfiction appear regularly in Slate, Salon, The Believer, Details, and New York, where he is a contributing editor. He is currently working on a personal and repertorial account of kids in their teens and twenties, to be published in 2007.

Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and then as a book editor for W. W. Norton and Henry Holt. He has been a full-time writer since 2001. His first book, Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative about Uzbekistan, was published in 2003, and was followed shortly thereafter by a volume of fake DVD commentaries entitled Speak, Commentary (written with Jeff Alexander). His short story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg appeared in 2005. His book The Father of All Things, a nonfiction account of his journey to Vietnam with his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War, will be published in early 2007.