Author Archive
SHERYL ST. GERMAIN
WHAT: 50 Miles, Book Launch (free event)
WHEN: MARCH 3, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
WHERE: Interabang Books 5600 W. Lovers Lane #142 Dallas, TX 75209
WordSpace is pleased to partner with Interabang Books to present this book release celebration!
50 Miles, (Etruscan Press, 2020) by Sheryl St. Germain is a memoir in linked essays that addresses addiction and alcoholism. The book traces the life of the author’s son, Gray, a talented but troubled young man, and his death from a drug overdose at thirty, as well as the author’s own recovery from substance abuse.She was named Louisiana Writer of the Year in November 2018.
Sheryl has taught at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, Iowa State University and Chatham University, where she served as Director of the MFA in Creative Writing for 14 years. She is the co-founder and director of the Words Without Walls Program.
Sheryl’s poetry books include Going Home (Perivale), The Mask of Medusa (Cross Cultural Communications), (chapbooks) Making Bread at Midnight, (Slough Press) How Heavy the Breath of God, The Journals of Scheherazade (University of North Texas Press), and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press). She has also published a chapbook of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien (Cross Cultural Communications).
She has published three memoirs, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman (University of Utah Press), Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair (Louisiana Literature Press), and, most recently, Fifty Miles, Etruscan Press, 2020.
She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century (Autumn House Press). With Sarah Shotland she co-edited Words Without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence and Incarceration, (Trinity University Press).
She published a new poetry collection, The Small Door of Your Death, in Spring 2018 with Autumn House Press. A collection of essays, Fifty Miles, is forthcoming with Etruscan Press in January 2020.
A native of New Orleans, Sheryl has taught creative writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, and Iowa State University. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay.
Harry McNabb
What: Poets on X+ Feature Reading Series and Open Mic
When: Friday, October 11, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Mighty Fine Arts Gallery, 409A N. Tyler St. Dallas, TX 75214
Hosted by: Opalina and Carlos Salas
Harry McNabb is a writer of short fiction. He has just published his first collection of funny and emotionally intimate yarns in a book titled Vacuum Stories.
Wine available, BYOB
WordSpace is proud to sponsor the Poets on X + Feature Reading Series and Open Mic every second Friday of the month!
Farid Matuk
Friday, February 28 7:00 p.m.
Latino Cultural Center
2600 Live Oak Street
Dallas, TX 75204
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. The recipient of grants and residencies from The Headlands Center for the Arts and The Lannan Foundation, Matuk teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and in 2020 will serve as the Holloway Visiting Professor in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. His collaboration with Colombian visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press.
Guillermo Gomez Pena
Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 7:00 p.m.
Latino Cultural Center
2600 Live Oak Street Dallas, TX 75204
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He was born in Mexico City, and moved to the U.S. in 1978, earning a BA and MA at California Institute of the Arts. He has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art. Gómez-Peña’s eight books include essays, experimental poetry and chronicles in both English, Spanish, and Spanglish; his books include The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century (2001) and Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (2001). He is a founding member of the art collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo and artistic director of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra. Gómez-Peña received many honors, including a US Artists fellow award (2012) and a MacArthur fellowship (1991), the first Chicano artist to receive the award. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
WordSpace is honored to partner with the Latino Cultural Center
Tongo Eisen-Martin
African Diaspora – New Dialogues
Thursday, November 7th at 7:00 p.m.
South Dallas Cultural Center
3400 S. Fitzhugh Dallas, TX 75210
Hosted by Ernest Mcmillan
WordSpace is proud to partner with the South Dallas Cultural Center to produce the 6th season of African Diaspora – New Dialogues Series.
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.
Host of the evening, Mr. Ernest McMillan is a veteran human rights activist with a history of working through the 60’s in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and throughout the 80’s with the National Black United Front and the United League of Mississippi. McMillan served as the Chairman of the Dallas SNCC from 1967- 1969.
Mr. McMillan received an Associate of Arts degree in History and Government at Brazos Junior College in Texas and has completed further study in history, government, and political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, UT Arlington, and the University of Houston at Clear Lake City, Texas.
He has extensive experience in counseling of both youth and adults. Additionally, he has worked successfully in management positions involved with the delivery of social services, organizing and planning resources, and coordinating activities to meet specific objectives. Mr. McMillan initiated the first Drug Prevention Program for African-American youth in Houston in 1981. He has developed support systems for ex-offenders and drug abusers as founder of People United for Justice for Prisoners in Dallas, Texas, and as a counselor for the Alternative Drug Abuse Program of VGS, Houston, Texas. Mr. McMillan also served as project manager at the Communities-In-School program at Wesley Elementary School, Houston.
In 1984, McMillan founded the Fifth Ward Enrichment Program, a non-profit, community based, youth development initiative. He served as its Chief Executive Officer, and after twenty-three years at the helm, he became its Executive Coach and Senior Adviser. The FWEP continues to operate in Houston’s inner city as an effective support and intervention system for young African-American and Hispanic males to this day
Currently, McMillan resides in Dallas, Texas where he volunteers extensively with several local and international efforts including the Dallas Peace Center, IFCO/ Pastors for Peace, and as a 2011 delegate to Witness For Peace’ Human Rights Delegation to Honduras. He became the Director of Educational Programs at Youth Believing in Change (YBC) after serving as a volunteer mentor, coordinator of the boys’ mentoring program and as a classroom facilitator there.
He most recently served as Curator for Community Action with Cara Mia Theatre Company. He is excited to be involved routinely in the work of connecting arts with the community and developing avenues to foster and engage multigenerational, multicultural bridges for community uplift. He is currently volunteering with the Owenwood Farm and Neighbor Space engaging area residents and stakeholders to build and sustain a community garden.
About South Dallas Cultural Center: The South Dallas Cultural Center (SDCC) is a City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs owned community center with a wide variety of programs inspired by the vibrancy and diversity of the African Diaspora. The SDCC seeks to educate and inspire through the visual, media, literary and performing arts. SDCC has presented some of the most dynamic visual and performing arts in Dallas. Retired Manager Vicki Meek’s decades of service to promote art and racial equity have profoundly influenced the cultural life of Dallas and the development of a whole new generation of African American artists. She is the co-developer of The Institute for Creative Investigation in Puerta Viejo, Costa Rica; Board Chair of Friends of the South Dallas Cultural Center; serves on the Advisory Board of WordSpace and co-founder of African Diaspora–New Dialogues with Karen Minzer and Dee Mitchell of WordSpace. Marilyn Clark, SDCC’s Education Director arranges special DISD school visits for the visiting writers of this series.
OddLot | ArtSpeak
Oddlot is a Dallas based band that features Chris Merlick, Dan Dobson, Chris Chapman and Jay Staton. Since 2011 they have been pursuing their own blend of eccentric music and original songs. Veterans of myriad infamous Dallas bands they have grouped together to become the “Oddlot”!
Mighty Fine Arts presents this exciting opening night of “Mandalas” featuring new work by Jason Cohen. This show opens Saturday Sept 28 with a reception for the artist and will run till Oct 27. The legendary Jason Cohen is a legacy bohemian artist of Dallas culture. He is a shameless practitioner of all things weird and wondrous and has dedicated his talents to undermining the tired and conventional. He is also a man of multiple abilities including artist, musician, entrepreneur, collector, fabricator and Dad.”Mandalas” features a selection of his psycho-meditative stream of consciousness art fungus pieces that eschew the spiritual for the surreal. Come out and get a full dose of Jason and get your mind Mandalazised! Ritual invocation will occur at Opening!
WordSpace is proud to partner with MFA Gallery to host ArtSpeak!
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
African Diaspora – New Dialogues
Thursday, October 24th at 7:00 p.m.
South Dallas Cultural Center
3400 S. Fitzhugh Dallas, TX 75210
Hosted by Sanderia Faye
WordSpace is proud to partner with the South Dallas Cultural Center to produce the 6th season of African Diaspora – New Dialogues Series.
“My writing is wide-ranging and concerns the malleability of language and forms. I am interested in the intersections of the innovative and experimental with aspects race, gender, and the more-than-human world. My work is ground in inquiry, ways of knowing, and how language can (and cannot) communicate experiences felt in body and mind. Even at its most cerebral my work is centered in notions of embodiment and the lived experience of seeing and being seen. My practice and process includes photographic and video work and mixed media composition. Current projects include computational poetics and emerging technologies, spell-casting, and collaborative writing.” – Lillian-Yvonne Bertram describes her work. Courtesy of Jack Jones Literary Arts.
Sanderia Faye serves on the faculty at Southern Methodist University, is an instructor at the 2017 Desert Nights Rising Stars Conference at Arizona State University, and a professional speaker and activist. Her novel, Mourner’s Bench, is the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in debut fiction and The Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit for fiction. She is co-founder and a fellow at Kimbilio Center for Fiction, and her work has appeared in the anthology Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas. Faye moderated the grassroots panel for the
Arkansas Civil Rights Symposium during the Freedom Riders 50th Anniversary and is coordinating the first AWP African Diaspora Caucus.
Her work received “Best Of” honors at the 2011 Eckerd College Writers’ Conference, Co-Directors Dennis Lehane and Sterling Watson, where her winning excerpt from the novel was published in SABAL Literary Journal. She received grants and scholarships offers from Hurston/Wright Writers Conference, Eckerd College Writers’ in Paradise Conference, Callaloo Writers Workshop, and Vermont, Writers Studio. She attended The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency.
She holds an MFA from Arizona State University, a MA from the University of Texas at Dallas, a BS in Accounting from the University of Arkansas. She is currently a PhD student in English at the University of North Texas.
African Diaspora-New Dialogues is in its 6th official season. It was unofficially kicked off in 2013 with Nikki Giovanni. The past five seasons have featured distinguished writers such as Duriel Harris, Vievee Francis, Tyehimba Jess, Roger Reeves, Dawn Lundy Martin, Chris Abani, Tim Seibles, Mitchell Jackson, Douglas Kearney, Tina McElroy Ansa, Walter Mosley, Lonnie Holley and Nicole Dennis-Benn.
About South Dallas Cultural Center: The South Dallas Cultural Center (SDCC) is a City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs owned community center with a wide variety of programs inspired by the vibrancy and diversity of the African Diaspora. The SDCC seeks to educate and inspire through the visual, media, literary and performing arts. SDCC has presented some of the most dynamic visual and performing arts in Dallas. Retired Manager Vicki Meek’s decades of service to promote art and racial equity have profoundly influenced the cultural life of Dallas and the development of a whole new generation of African American artists. She is the co-developer of The Institute for Creative Investigation in Puerta Viejo, Costa Rica; Board Chair of Friends of the South Dallas Cultural Center; serves on the Advisory Board of WordSpace and co-founder of African Diaspora–New Dialogues with Karen Minzer and Dee Mitchell of WordSpace. Marilyn Clark, SDCC’s Education Director arranges special DISD school visits for the visiting writers of this series.
The Work of Robert Pinsky
A Martha Heimberg Salon!
RSVP for address HERE or write wordspace@wordspace.us
ABOUT MARTHA:
Former long-time WordSpace Board Member Martha Heimberg facilitates an evening of analytical review and comparative investigations of works by Robert Pinsky. All with her inimitable warm hospitality and refreshments provided by WordSpace.
Martha Heimberg has been writing about theater, the arts and historic preservation for over 40 years for numerous Texas newspapers and magazines, including, D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and The Texas Tribune. She currently is a contributing theater critic and arts writer for Theater Jones and Dallas Weekly, and is a member of the American Theater Critics Association. She has won multiple awards from the Dallas Press Club and the Texas Historic Commission and is a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum, WordSpace, and the Historic Preservation League (now Preservation Dallas). Founder and coordinator of DART’s Poetry in Motion program, she currently serves on the board of directors of Junius Heights Historic District Association and Friends of Aldredge House. Her degrees in English and comparative literature are from Southern Methodist University. For over 40 years, she taught English and creative studies at Richland College, Southern Methodist University and Northwood University. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015, and now teaches a twice-weekly adult literacy class at Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT). She’s also a messy and ardent amateur painter, printer and potter.
ABOUT POET ROBERT PINSKY:
Robert Pinsky received a BA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an MA and PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
He is also the author of several prose titles, including Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters (W. W. Norton, 2013);The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).
About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, “Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician’s dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions.”
From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in Americans’ lives.
In 1999, he co-edited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).
His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He served as a Chancellor for The Academy of American Poets from 2004 to 2010. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
V.P. CROWE at Poets on X +
V.P. Crowe
What: Poets on X+ Feature Reading Series and Open Mic
When: Friday, September 13, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Mighty Fine Arts Gallery, 409A N. Tyler St. Dallas, TX 75214
Hosted by: Opalina and Carlos Salas
V. P. Crowe stumbled on the Dallas poetry scene waaay back when there wasn’t much more to it than Joe Stanco’s Poets Roundtable and Chumley’s open mic night down in Deep Ellum, and the Dallas poetry scene hasn’t quite been able to shake her loose since. Her work has appeared most recently at thewildword.com and as part of The Writer’s Garret’s 2018 Common Language Project. She lives in the suburbs with a mad scientist and a houseful of fur, and tends to only write when a thing takes her by the throat and won’t let go.
Link to VP Crowe’s poetry published in The Wild Word
Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
WHAT: ROSEMARY MEZA-DES PLAS at Dee Mitchell Salon
WHERE: RSVP to wordspace@wordspace.us
WHEN: Thursday, August 22 7:00 – 9:00
Farmington, NM-based Latina, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas is known for exploring gender, sexuality, identity, and socio-political topics in her spoken word performances. A native Texan, she lived for many years in the Dallas/Ft.Worth metroplex. She received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Hoffberger School of Painting) and a BFA from The University of North Texas. In 2019, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas was featured in Santa Fe, NM’s the/magazine as “12 Artists in New Mexico to Know Now”.
Ms. Meza-DesPlas’ moves effortlessly through varying tempos and characters to create performances made up of frank and touching vignettes. The visual of her stage presence is accentuated by innovative costumes. Ms. Meza-DesPlas’ recent spoken word performances were at Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; FreeForm Art Space, Santa Fe, NM; Durango Arts Center, Durango, CO; and ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL. In 2018, she presented the academic paper Reclaiming the Tool of Anger: Year of the Angry Women at the 9th International Conference of the Image in Hong Kong. Her academic paper Heaviness, Hardship, Heft: Gender-based Burdens in Images was published in 2018 by the International Journal on the Image, Volume 9, Issue 3.
Dee Mitchell is a freelance writer based in Dallas. Locally he has been a contributor to The Dallas Observer and The Dallas Morning News, and he is a frequent contributor to Art in America. He has written essays for exhibitions at The Dallas Museum of Art, The Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art, The UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, and many other commercial and non-profit exhibition spaces. In 2008 he retired from Half Price Books, Records, and Magazines, where he was Executive Vice President of New Media Purchases and Proprietary Publishing. He is also active on the Dallas Video Festival board. Winner: 2015 Dallas Observer MasterMinds Award. Dee is curator and host of First Hearings @ The Wild Detectives. How Dee Mitchell Helped Put WordSpace at the Heart of the Dallas Literary Renaissance by Lee Escobedo (D Magazine)
