What: Dallas is the site of the 2014 Beat Poetry Festival. In conjunction with this free featival, WordSpace sponsors Chuck Taylor’s Memoir workshop and Christopher Carmona’s poetics workshop.
Where: Lucky Dog Books, 633 W. Davis St.
When: The festival begins on Thursday, November 6 and runs through Saturday night, November 8. The workshops are 10-12 for Memoir, and 12-2 for Poetry. Both workshops are free.
Registration for the festival is open until October 16th and more information can be found here. More coming on venues and readers for this beatific festival coming soon.
The Beat Poetry Festival was founded by a group of Texas poets, inpsired by the movement made famous by writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, The 4th Annual Beat Poetry Festival will be held this year in Dallas, TX on Nov. 6-8. Organizers Christopher Carmona and Chuck Taylor will be offering workshops.
Christopher Carmona was a nominee for the Alfredo Cisneros de Miral Foundation Award for Writers in 2011 and a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, the Sagebrush Review, and tecolote. His first collection of poetry called beat was published by Slough Press and his second book, I Have Always Been Here is published by Otras Voces Press. He is also editing a Beat Texas anthology called The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson and is working on a book called Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Poetics with Isaac Chavarria, Gabriel Sanchez, & Rossy Lima Padilla to be published by University of New Mexico Press in 2015. Currently he is the organizer of the Annual Beat Poetry and Arts Festival and the Artistic Director of the Coalition of New Chican@ Artists. Visit his website here.
Chuck Taylor is a Texas Yankee reared in Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, and North Carolina, won the Austin Book Award for his collection, What Do You Want, Blood? He has worked in the Poets- in-the-Schools program, been a CETA poet in Salt Lake City, operated a used bookstore, worked in the laundry of a hospital, labored for the Terrill State Mental Hospital and the Texas School for the Deaf, owned a small press, and is the former Coordinator of Creative Writing at Texas A&M University. Conversations with the poet Lucien Stryk in 1967 stimulated his interest in Asian culture and he was able to work and study in Japan from 1991-94. Married three times, he has three children, three stepchildren, and six grandchildren. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including most recently, Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon (Pecan Grove, 2008).