Wordspace Dallas

Welcome to WordSpace

2015 Dallas Observer MasterMind Winners:
WordSpace Director Karen Minzer and President Charles Dee Mitchell

WordSpace has presented programs with poets, prose writers, songwriters, playwrights, performance artists and scholars across the broadest possible spectrum, including Robert Creeley, Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jeffrey Liles, Booker Prize winner James Kelman, Dagoberto Gilb, Terry Allen, 2013 National Book Critics Circle winner Ben Fountain, Ed Sanders, Andrei Codrescu, Dan Savage, Amy Sedaris, Nikki Giovanni, Sandra Bernhard, John Waters, and Caravan of Dreams co-founder, Johnny Dolphin. WordSpace has produced numerous interdiscipinary events and public webcam readings with writers from countries around the globe, including Philippines PEN award recipient, Edwin Cordevilla, Persian exiles-in-London poets, Abol Froushan and Ali Abdolrezaei, Korean Presidential Award recipient Tae Joo Jah, as well as the films of Robert Frank, and Between Covers: An Exhibition for Smart Phones, Texas Unbound literary festivals at Undermain Theater and The Latino Arts Festival at Bishop Arts. WordSpace is honored to promote independent presses, pay honoraria to emerging artists, and feature Dallas Poetry Slam, Poets at X Reading Series, Pegasus Reading Series and ArtSpeak, a performance art series.

Next Generation Project: WordSpace sponsors innovative and educational programs for Dallas youth, offering free writing and performance workshops, open mics, annual all-city student readings, and students in Salon alongside award winning writers. Our Summer Internship Program hosts young writers from universities around the country.

A NOTE ON THE LOCAL

The local is not a place but a place in a given man – what part of it

he has been compelled or else brought by love to give witness to in

his own mind. And that is THE form, that is, the whole thing, as

whole as it can get.

I think we will be fools to be embarrassed by it. We know the

other neatness possible, the way of the neat pattern, and the dodging

which it must call for. Grace has no part in that. At some point

reached by us, sooner or later, there is no longer much else but

ourselves, in the place given to us. To make that present, and actual

for other men, is not an embarrassment, but love.

First person, no. 1, 1961.
Robert Creeley