Mary Helen Specht
What: First Hearings
Who: Mary Helen Specht
When: Thursday, February 19, 7 pm
Where: The Wild Detectives, 14 West Eighth Street, 75208, in Bishop Arts District
Hosted by: Charles Dee MitchellCharles Dee Mitchell curates and hosts the series First Hearings. Meet authors. Hear them read. Buy their books. Get their autographs. (And the bar will be open for business.)Mary Helen Specht was born and raised in Abilene, Texas. She has a B.A. in English from Rice University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, where she won the department’s fiction award. Her writing has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in numerous publications, including: The New York Times; The Colorado Review; Prairie Schooner; Michigan Quarterly Review; The Southwest Review; Florida Review; Southwestern American Literature; World Literature Today; Blue Mesa; Hunger Mountain; Bookslut; The Texas Observer; and Night Train, where she won the Richard Yates Short Story Award.
A past Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.“An ambitious, highly accomplished debut. . . . Specht moves among a deep cast of characters and corresponding perspectives with absolute mastery. . . . Most important, and impressive, is Specht’s sure handling of the interior life.”
Ben Fountain, author ofBilly Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Pegasus Reading Series: Cure, Gabbert, George, and Jacob!
WordSpace @ Two Bronze Doors presents, our fourth installment of The Pegasus Reading Series, a new monthly forum for poets and writers to showcase their work in the DFW area. This month we showcase the work of Logen Cure, Mag Gabbert, Luca Jacob, and more!
Logen Cure is a poet and teacher. She is the author of two spoken word projects: the Make it Memorable EP (2014) and In Keeping, a chapbook published by Unicorn Press (2008). Her work also appears in Word Riot, Radar Poetry, IndieFeed: Performance Poetry, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Texas with her wife.
Mag Gabbert is a PhD student at Texas Tech with a specialization in creative writing, specifically in poetry and non-fiction. She graduated with a bachelors in English from Trinity University and received her MFA in poetry writing from The University of California at Riverside. Mag is a contributing writer for The Nervous Breakdown, where her essays regularly appear.
Her poetry, essays, and reviews have also been published or are forthcoming in The Rattling Wall, The Rumpus, and The San Antonio Current, among others. Mag has previously served as the co-editor of The Trinity Review and associate poetry editor of The Coachella Review; she is now an associate editor of Iron Horse Review and is the graduate advisor of Texas Tech’s undergraduate literary journal, The Harbinger.
Chris George lives and works in Dallas, Texas where he is the resident writer at Two Bronze Doors art gallery and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Disembodied Text. His work has been featured in a number of journals, including The Arts United, Spiderweb Salon, and LUX. His chapbook Dreamscapes was published by Micro-Micro Press in 2013.
Lucas Jacob’s poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in several dozen journals, including Southwest Review, Barrow Street, and Potomac Review, and are forthcoming in many others, including Western Humanities Review. A past winner of the Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Contest, he was short-listed for the Fish Poetry Prize (2012), was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Poetry Prize (2013), was a semi-finalist for the Norman Mailer Award in short fiction (2012), and was a semi-finalist in the Frost Place Chapbook competition (2014). He lives in Fort Worth, and he teaches and does arts-program-administation work at the Trinity Valley School, where he is humbled by his students, who are terrific except in their refusal to live by his classroom motto: “No cats.”
Fan View: Martha Heimberg talks about Kay Ryan
When: Thursday, June 4, 7 pm
What: Salon: Fan View: Martha Heimberg talks about Kay Ryan
RSVP for location: wordspace@wordspace.us
Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), andSay Uncle (2000). Her bookThe Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Ryan’s tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the end of tenure, Ryan called herself a “whistle-blower” who “advocated for much underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation.”
Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world. Her quizzical, philosophical, often mordant poetry is a product of years of thought. Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” Critic Meghan O’Rourke has written of her work: “Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them.” “Sharks’ Teeth” displays that meandering approach to her subject matter, which, Ryan says, “gives my poems a coolness. I can touch things that are very hot because I’ve given them some distance.”
Kay Ryan is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has received the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award, as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Since 2006 she has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Martha Heimberg, presenter, has been writing about theater, the arts and historic preservation for over 30 years for numerous Texas newspapers and magazines, including Dallas Weekly, D Magazineand Texas Monthly. She currently writes a weekly theater column for Turtle Creek News. She has won awards from the Dallas Press Club and the Texas Historic Commission, and is a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum. She coordinates DART’sPoetry in Motion program, and has served many years on the WordSpace board. Her degrees in English and comparative literature are from Southern Methodist University. She is associate professor of English at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas.
Angela Ards Book Release Salon
Friday, February 5, 7:30 pm
Book Release: Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era (University of Wisconsin Press)
Bonus: Darryl Dickson-Carr will conduct an interview with Professor Ards
Bonus #2: Hosted by Sanderia Faye
RSVP for location: 214-838-3554, wordspace@wordspace.us
Angela Ards has published extensively on African American literature and culture in the post-civil rights era, a historical moment that demands recalibrated ways of thinking about black identity as questions of gender and class complicate allegiances and agendas previously based on race. Her book examines how writers bring their lived experience to bear on crafting both a language and a politic that might account for this new stage of African American history. She received her PhD from Princeton University and teaches at SMU.
“Ambitious, timely, engaging, and provocative. Angela Ards, erudite and remarkably widely read, situates her analysis of a new political ethic grounded in black women’s experience at the intersection of autobiography studies, feminism, black literary history, and cultural and political theory.”
WordSpace @ Tyler Davis Festival
All Day! Multiple Artists! Mighty Fine Arts, To the Ends of the Earth, Oil and Cotton, Ant Colony, and More.
Founded in 1994, WordSpace presents over 50 annual programs with poets, prose writers, songwriters, playwrights, performance artists and scholars across the broadest possible spectrum.
WordSpace is made up of working writers, artists and educators dedicated to connecting Dallas literary scene with the widest possible audience. It was founded with the determination to encourage and develop emerging local writers and performers by offering a paid honorarium. Many of these writers have gone on to receive prestigious awards and author success.
Their wide range of activities include celebrity-writer events. Performers have included Laurie Anderson, Nikki Giovanni, Sandra Bernhard, John Waters, Amy Sedaris and Dan Savage.
WordSpace sponsors an innovative Next Generation Project with annual student readings, monthly open mics, students reading in Salons alongside published writers, and free writing workshops. The WordSpace Summer Intern program host paid university students around the country.
John Darnielle @ The Wild Detectives
WHO: John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats will be at the Wild Detectives reading from his National Book Award longlisted debut novel, WOLF IN WHITE VAN (out now from the legendary FSG).
WHAT: Darnielle will read from his debut novel & do a signing for us.
WHEN: Sunday, October 5th, 2014 at 7:00PM
WHERE: The Wild Detectives, 314 W Eighth St, Dallas, TX 75208
Presented by Deep Vellum Publishing & WordSpace with The Wild Detectives.
Here’s an interview and brief overview of his novel at the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Also reviewed in The New York Times and The Austin Chronicle.
Gemini @ Dallas Poetry Slam
What: WordSpace Feature @ Dallas Poetry Slam
When: Friday, April 17, 8 pm
Where: Heroes, 7402 Greenville Avenue
Hosted by: Hosted by RockBaby and GNO
Admission: $5, WordSpace Members Free
Richelle Scott known as Gemini in the artist society started taking an interest in performing poetry in 2007. She was 18 when she realized this was her passion. In 2010 she took an interest in slam and placed 3rd at the Southwest Shootout Regional Slam. Then she place at the Dallas Slam to lock a spot on the team to go on to Nationals. The team placed top 20. When she returned from Dallas she featured many colleges, poetry slams, and all kinds of events around the US. She writes from her and her family`s experiences. She is now attending University of North Texas for a BA in Integrative studies of Sociology, Anthropology, and Philosophy. She started a organization at the university in 2007 called Poetic Justice that is still going strong. She will be graduating August 2015. She is a mother of two beautiful boys. She lives in Houston and works at Memorial Hermann Hospital. She continues to perform in shows and is working on various projects. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @ RichelleGemini, Facebook Richelle Gemini Scott to keep up with her upcoming shows and projects.
Val B @ Dallas Poetry Slam
What: WordSpace Feature Series @ Dallas Poetry Slam
When: Friday, February 20, 8 pm
Where: Heroes, 7402 Greenville Avenue
Hosted by: RockBaby and GNO
Admission: $5, WordSpace Members Free
My government name is Vallerie Birdow. I’m 26 years old. I was born in Fort Worth, raised in Cuney, Texas, and went to school k-12 in Palestine, Texas. I graduated from PHS in 2006, then moved to Houston to attend Texas Southern University. I transferred to UT Tyler after my junior year where I’m currently completing the Bachelors of Arts in psychology degree program.
I got into poetry while going out to open mic venues when I was living in Houston. I was intrigued by the energy in the places. It was always calm, yet exciting. I loved watching artists bare their souls before crowds. I started writing as a way to release stress and tension and decided to perform a personal poem one night at an open mic. I got a great response from the audience and they seemed to like it so I started writing more and releasing on stage at whatever open mics I could find. After an open mic performance at Heroes Lounge for the first time, I was asked to be a feature, and that has been my only breakthrough in poetry thus far but I hope to have more.
Christopher Michael @ Dallas Poetry Slam
When: Friday, January 16, 8 pm
Where: Heroes, 7402 Greenville Avenue
Hosted by: RockBaby and GNO
Admission: $5, WordSpace Members Free
Beat Poetry Festival Workshops with Chuck Taylor and Christopher Carmona
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).
