Verb Kulture at Dallas Poetry Slam
When: Friday, November 20, 8 pm
Where: Heroes, Greenville Ave.
Hosted by: Dallas Poetry Slam, SlamMasters GNO & RockBaby
What: WordSpace Night @ DPS
Verb Kulture is a perfect word to describe her. She is poetry in motion. Verb was born and raised on the Southside of Chicago. She is a performing artist that possesses many talents which include being a Spoken Word Artist, a Slam Champion, Dancer, Musician, Producer, Writer, Host, Motivational Speaker and so much more. She is the founder and CEO of Verb Kulture Ent. This young woman has a gift of bringing people together and reaching an audience. Her dynamic performances grabs your attention and speak to your heart. She is currently the producer of some of the biggest shows in Dallas/Fort Worth area including the Annual Changing Faces Masquerade Ball and the Annual Harlem Renaissance Extravaganza…Verb has been performing for the majority of her life and believes that everyone has a story to tell and the capability of making a difference in the lives of others. This national artist has been seen on many stages and has performed with many Grammy Award winning artists. She was a featured artist on season 3 of Tv One’s Verses and Flow show where she shared the stage with Mary Mary and Vivian Green. Her talents have landed her many great opportunities. When she is not on the stage, you can find her producing empowering shows presented by Verb Kulture Ent. like W.O.W. (Words over Wine), Poetry’s Love Affair with Music, and Beat Street Poetry. She is a true lover of all art forms and provides a platform for all up and coming talent. Verb is currently working on a project to be released this year which will feature and include Grammy Award winning musicians. You can find Verb hitting the stages with her new band “Jus Lyke Muzic” soon. To keep up with this renaissance woman and all of the great works she is creating, follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @verbkulture
Rachel McKibbens at Dallas Poetry Slam
When: October 23, 8 pm
Where: Heroes, Greenville Ave.
Hosted by: Dallas Poetry Slam, SlamMasters GNO & RockBaby
What: WordSpace Night @ DPS
Admission: $5
Poet, activist, playwright and essayist Rachel McKibbens is a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of the critically acclaimed volume of poetry, Pink Elephant (Cypher Books, 2009.) Regarded as one of the most dynamic speakers in the country, McKibbens is a legend within the poetry slam community, noted for her accomplishments both on and off the stage: she is a nine-time National Poetry Slam team member, has appeared on eight NPS final stages, coached the New York louderARTS poetry slam team to three consecutive final stage appearances, is the 2009 Women of the World Poetry Slam champion and the 2011 National Underground Poetry Slam individual champion. For four years McKibbens taught poetry through the Healing Arts Program at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan and continues to teach poetry and creative writing and give lectures across the country as an advocate for mental health awareness, gender-equality and victims of violence and domestic abuse.
Rudy Francisco at Dallas Poetry Slam
When: Friday 18, 8 pm
Where: Heroes, Greenville Ave.
Hosted by: Dallas Poetry Slam SlamMasters GNO & RockBaby
What: WordSpace Night @ DPS
Rudy Francisco completed his B.A in Psychology at 21 and continued his education by pursuing a MA in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology. He has made conscious efforts to cultivate young poets and expose the youth to the genre of Spoken Word Poetry through workshops and performances at schools and community centers. In addition to his contributions to education, Rudy Francisco is the co-host of the largest poetry venue in San Diego. Rudy’s goal is to continue to assist others in harnessing their creativity while cultivating his own. Rudy Francisco is the 2009 National Underground Poetry Slam Champion, the 2010 San Diego Grand Slam Champion, the 2010 San Francisco Grand Slam Champion and the 2010 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion.
ArtSpeak: Moni Bell and Mad Mother Gobblin
When: Saturday, July 18, 9 pm
Where: Mighty Fine Arts, 409A N. Tyler in Historic North Oak Cliff 75208
The work of Moni Bell traces some dark paths through sharks, uncertainty, impending chaos and more sharks. Her world is full of jagged sharp edges but rendered in exuberant colors and patterns and humor mitigating the darkness and keeping it at bay. What she arrives at is a perilous balance between heaven and hell, which pretty much reflects our own dilemmas. Expect as much with her musical performance which will allow you to dance with the sharks and if you get bit so what? Its part of the thrill of life!
WordSpace Season Launch Party with Special Guests Amber Tamblyn and Derrick Brown
When: Thursday, September 17, Party starts at 7:00pm. Performance starts at 8:00pm.
Where: The Wild Detectives (Oak Cliff)
Hosted by WordSpace: Charles Dee Mitchell, RockBaby, Sara Cardona, Jean Lamberty, Steve Cruz, Jerry Kelley, Laney Yarber, Richard Bailey, and Karen X Minzer.
Last year the WordSpace Season Launch Party gathered around 50 friends and supporters for a night of drinks, conversation, and presentations. This year we are making the party bigger in every way. Poets Amber Tamblyn and Derrick Brown have been causing a scene wherever they go with their Lazers of Sexcellence Tour. On September 17, they will be performing free on the outdoor stage at The Wild Detectives.
Here’s the thing about Amber Tamblyn: How many poets have a resume that includes a story arc on Two and Half Men and a stint as guest blogger for The Poetry Foundation? I’m pretty sure that puts Amber in a field of one. Amber Tamblyn is an actress and a poet. If you are a woman in, say, your late twenties or early thirties, you probably remember her as the eponymous Joan of Arcadia. Since then she has continued to act and to publish four well-received books of poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who knows about these things, said of her first collection, “A fine, fruitful gestation of throbbingly nascent sexuality, awakened in young new language.” Roxanne Gay described her latest book, Dark Sparkler, as “astonishing.”
Derrick Brown is a poet, performer and publisher based in Austin, Texas. As a slam poet, he has performed in over 1800 venues ranging 
from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, to The Glastonbury Festival in the UK and The Sorbonne in Paris. (The one in France.) His 2012 collection Strange Light won Texas Poetry Book of the Year. In 2004, he founded Write Bloody Publishing which to date has out close to 100 books. And, like Amber, Derrick is not without acting credits. In 2014 he provided the voice of Mappy in Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
This duo has been touring the country with The Lazers of Sexcellence, described as a “ruckus…of poetry, comedy and music.” Come out to enjoy the show, hear what else WordSpace has planned for the year, grab a $1.00 taco (while they last) and select one of the happy hour specials at The Wild Detectives Bar.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
September 17 is North Texas Giving Day, the day when a portion of every dollar you give to one of the participating non-profit organizations earns matching funds from The Dallas Communities Foundation.
WordSpace is a non-profit, and we are participating. As the day approaches, your in box will no doubt fill with reminders from every school, museum, theater, dance company, and wildlife rescue organization you have ever crossed paths with. Please be generous and think of WordSpace. Donations must be made on the internet through the NTGD portal, but WordSpace will have volunteers standing by to make the process as quick and painless as possible. (Or you can give at home during the day.)
THE WORDSPACE PLEDGE TO YOU: Our fundraising will not slow down the fun on September 17.
Sanderia Faye Book Launch Celebration
Salon & Book Launch Celebration: Mourner’s Bench
Who: Debut novel by Sanderia Faye
When: Thursday, October 1, 7 pm
Where: RSVP for the Party! WordSpace@WordSpace.Us
Yes! Copies of Mourner’s Bench will be On Sale!
At the First Baptist Church of Maeby, Arkansas,the sins of the child belonged to the parents until the child turned thirteen. Sarah Jones was only eight years old in the summer of 1964, but with her mother Esther Mae on eight prayer lists and flipping around town with the generally mistrusted civil rights organizers, Sarah believed it was time to get baptized and take responsibility for her own sins. That would mean sitting on the mourner’s bench come revival, waiting for her sign, and then testifying in front of the whole church.
But first, Sarah would need to navigate the growing tensions of small-town Arkansas in the 1960s. Both smarter and more serious than her years (a “fifty-year-old mind in an eight-year-old body,” according to Esther), Sarah was torn between the traditions, religion, and work ethic of her community and the progressive civil rights and feminist politics of her mother, who had recently returned from art school in Chicago. When organizers from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to town just as the revival was beginning, Sarah couldn’t help but be caught up in the turmoil. Most folks just wanted to keep the peace, and Reverend Jefferson called the SNCC organizers “the evil among us.” But her mother, along with local civil rights activist Carrie Dilworth, the SNCC organizers, Daisy Bates, attorney John Walker, and indeed most of the country, seemed determined to push Maeby toward integration.
With characters as vibrant and evocative as their setting, Mourner’s Bench is the story of a young girl coming to terms with religion, racism, and feminism while also navigating the terrain of early adolescence and trying to settle into her place in her family and community.
WordSpace is honored to be first to present the debut novel of Sanderia Faye in Dallas. We will also be hosting a conversation between Sanderia and Greg Brownderville October 22 at The Wild Detectives, but the celebration starts now!
About the Author
Sanderia Faye was born and raised in Gould, Arkansas. She is the author of Mourner’s Bench (University of Arkansas Press, September 2015). Her work has appeared in various literary journals and in Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, edited by historians Dr. Jennifer Wallach and Dr. John Kirk.
Faye is co-founder and fellow at Kimbilio Center for Fiction. She moderated a 2015 AWP panel and the grassroots panel for the Arkansas Civil Rights Symposium during the Freedom Riders 50th Anniversary. She is a recipient of awards, residencies, and fellowships from Hurston/Wright Writers Conference, Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise Conference, Callaloo Writers Workshop, Vermont, Writers Studio, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency.
Faye is also a PhD candidate in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, and a BS in Accounting from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. She was an instructor for The United States Navy-Navy College Program for Afloat College Education (NCPACE)
Sarah Gerard and Colin Winnette
First Hearings: Sarah Gerard and Colin Winnette
When: Wednesday, October 14, 7 pm
Where: The Wild Detectives, 314 W. 8th Street, (Oak Cliff)
Hosted by: Charles Dee Mitchell
By now I’ve read Binary Star twice, and I’ve become so entwined with it that I’m reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I’ve never read anything like it. — Harry Mathews
I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard’s brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy, devastated, loving all of it. — Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines
Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard’s young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity—ideological, mental, physical—comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is “I want to look at the sky and understand.” —Justin Taylor, author of Flings
A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way. — Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard’s first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage. — Simon Van Booy, author of The Illusion of Separateness
Haints Stay is the story of two brothers, Brooke and Sugar, one of whom is pregnant with the other’s child. After the two middling bounty hunters are chased from town due to a bathhouse brawl, they encounter Bird — a boy who mysteriously appears in their camp with no memory and palms as smooth as stones. As the past races to catch up with them, each sets off in pursuit of their own peculiar sense of justice and belonging. An acid Western in the tradition of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Kelly Reichart’sMeek’s Cutoff, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, the novel features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, young love, a wagon train, stampedes, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger.
In addition to being called “…the most anticipated American independent novel…” by Flavorwire , the novel was a Rumpus Book Club pick for May and a #brazosbest pick by Brazos Bookstore for June.
FIRST HEARINGS: ANTONIO RUIZ-CAMACHO AT THE WILD DETECTIVES
Come h
ear Antonio Ruiz-Camacho read from Barefoot Dogs, his book of linked short stories that follows the members of an elite Mexico City family who flee the country after the kidnapping and murder of their patriarch. Author Ben Fountain says of Barefoot Dogs, “Each of these stories is a straight-on jab to the soul, the kind of sharp fictional punch that wakes us up to our own flawed, fragile, essential humanity.”
Following the reading, Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico, will join the author in conversation and a discussion with the audience.
The reading and discussion takes place May 20, 7:00PM at The Wild Detectives, 314 West Eighth Street, Dallas, 75208. Food and drinks will be available, and Antonio will be signing books.
Earth Day Student Reading
When: Saturday, April 25, noon-5
Where: Fair Park
Hosted by: Scott Davison
Booker T. Washington hosts an annual student reading in a cool new venue.
Chris Merlick @ Mighty Fine Arts
Who: Chris Merlick
What: Artspeak
When: April 18, 9pm
Where: Mighty Fine Arts, 409A North Tyler Street (Oak Cliff)
