Vievee Francis
What: Vievee Francis at The SDCC
When: April 23, 7 pm
Where: South Dallas Cultural Center, 3400 Fitzhugh
VIP Reception: 6:30-7:30, Refreshments provided by Buttons!
Master Class Enrollment is limited. To apply go here.
REGISTRATION IS CLOSED FOR MASTER CLASS
WordSpace is honored to partner with South Dallas Cultural Center to present great writers in conjunction with their theater series “Black Pain Black Power”.
Vievee Francis is the author of Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), which won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for a second collection, and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University, 2006). Her third book, Forest Primeval, is slated for release in 2015 (Northwestern University Press). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies including Poetry, Best American Poetry, Cura, Waxwing and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (W.W. Norton 2012). She has also been a Poet in Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan. In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is currently an Associate Editor for Callaloo, and a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing (Undergraduate Creative Writing Program) at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.
Member Salon with John Slate
John H. Slate is the archivist for the City of Dallas, where he is responsible for historic city government records in the Dallas Municipal Archives. Slate is the author of “Lost Austin,” a recently published book in the “Images of America” series. “Lost Austin” records some of the city’s rich and unique history and most of the images depicted in the book are of seminal Austin places and institutions that no longer exist but that played an important role in shaping Austin’s special character. He is also the author of “Historic Dallas Parks” and “Dealey Plaza.”
Mitchell S. Jackson
When: February 6, 7:30 pm
Where: South Dallas Cultural Center, 3400 Fitzhugh
VIP Reception: 6:30-7:30, Refreshments provided by Buttons!
More Info: WordSpace@WordSpace.us
Mitchell S. Jackson is a Portland, Oregon native who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received an M.A. in writing from Portland State University and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from New York University. He has been the recipient of fellowships from Urban Artist Initiative and The Center For Fiction and is the former winner of the Hurston Wright Foundation’s award for college writers. Jackson teaches writing at New York University. He published the e-book Oversoul: Stories and Essays in the summer of 2012. His novel The Residue Years was released in the summer of 2013 and was praised by publications such as The New York Times, The Times of London, and O, the Oprah Magazine. The novel was a finalist for the Center For Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First novel prize, the PEN/ Hemingway award for first fiction, The Hurston / Wright Legacy Award for best fiction by a writer of African descent; it was long-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for writing and the Chautauqua Prize. As well, it was named an “Honor Book” by the BCALA
WordSpace is honored to partner with South Dallas Cultural Center to present great writers in conjunction with their theater series “Black Pain Black Power”.
About South Dallas Cultural Center:
 With everything from classes for the education-minded to finger-poppin’ jazz jams for the young and the old hipsters, the SDCC, located just outside the Fair Park complex, is a community resource for all Dallas residents. 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.Join the South Dallas Cultural Center on facebook and sign up to receive our e-newsletter! |
About Buttons: 15207 ADDISON ROAD, Addison, Texas, 972.503.2888
Buttons is built around the idea that the ‘love of great food’ and ‘music’ are universal, the idea that diversity is beautiful and that all people have much in common. We strive to offer much more than a plate of great food…we create a great experience.
Buttons has been creating this Vibe since our opening in Fort Worth in 2008. The vision caught on so well in Fort Worth, and so many of our guests were coming all the way from Dallas and Addison, we decided to bring the Vibe to Addison and opened our second location, Buttons Addison there in September of 2009. The response in Addison was overwhelmingly positive and we are grateful that our new location was so readily embraced. We also believed that many of our guests would like a more intimate, supper club feel so we decided to launch the Buttons Jazz Cafe in Desoto in April of 2011. The Jazz Cafe focuses on Chef Hicks’ signature cuisine combined with a more intimate style of musical offerings. We have had requests to expand to numerous other cities and it is our ambition to expand nationally. We have received many awards for our upscale Southern cuisine and for our Live Music, but in many ways we measure our success by our guests. We love being a diverse venue, where people of different backgrounds and races mingle, eat, laugh and dance together. It is our mission to bring that experience around the country, to be a place where our guests have joyful experiences and where people from different backgrounds get to know one another. Chef Keith Hicks is known for his signature upscale Southern menu featuring classics like Chicken and Waffles and Shrimp Fish and Gritz, and Old School Pot Roast. Chef Hicks has made comfort food into an art form and above all we are a restaurant with outstanding food. To help create the ambience we crave, we feature live music in all Buttons locations. Jazz, R&B, Blues and Motown era music are the staples, and most evenings many of our guests are dancing by the end of the night. We have a unique mission for a restaurant, and our staff are the ones who make it a reality. They are passionate about what we stand for as a company and are partners in the movement. They have become the Buttons family. We operate on a few simple principals:
- Create a great experience by serving award winning food accompanied by soulful live music.
- Treat each and every guest like we were inviting them into our homes.
- Show respect for each and every guest and each and every staff member
Those are the guiding lights for Buttons, and while they are few we believe if we follow them we can achieve great things together.
ArtSpeak: Holiday Jamnation
When: Saturday, Dec. 13, 9 pm
Where: Mighty Fine Arts, 409A N. Tyler St., 75208
In conjunction with the artists reception for the Cat Show, Wordspace closes out this year’s Artspeak Series with a Holiday Jamnation featuring Randall Garrett and Inferno Texino with Andy Don Emmons, Clay Stinnett, Jason Cohen and Mark Martinek. Expect the big throwdown around 9 with unexpected guests and spontaneous combustions!Cancelled: LeAnne Howe
Due to unforeseen circumstances LeAnne Howe has cancelled her upcoming Dallas appearance. Stay tuned for new dates.
What: 1st Hearings presents LeAnne Howe
When: Sunday, February 22, 7 pm
Where: The Wild Detectives
Hosted by: Charles Dee Mitchell
Student Readers from Yavneh Academy: Denise Folz & Cassie Gross
LeAnne will be guest presenter at the Yavneh Academy Arts Day, annually organized by Dr. Tim Cloward.
LeAnne Howe (born in 1951) is an American author and English Department Chair at University of Georgia. An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Howe’s work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her book Shell Shaker received the Before Columbus Foundation‘s American Book Award for 2002.
Howe is an author, playwright, and scholar. Born and educated in Oklahoma, she writes fiction, creative non-fiction, plays, poetry, and screenplays that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. She has read her fiction and been an invited lecturer in Japan, Jordan, Israel, Romania, and Spain. Founder and director of WagonBurner Theatre Troop, her plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York City, New Mexico, Maine, Texas, and Colorado.
Howe is the screenwriter and on-camera narrator for the 90-minute PBS documentary Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire. The documentary takes Howe to the North Carolina homelands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to discover how their fusion of tourism, community, and cultural preservation is the key to the tribe’s health in the 21st century.
She is also writer/co-producer of a new documentary project, Playing Pastime: American Indian Fast-Pitch Softball, and Survival, with three-time Emmy award-winning filmmaker, James Fortier. The story is about the southeastern tribes and Indians who have been playing baseball and fast-pitch softball since the 1880s in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Production began in August 2004.
Howe’s first novel, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco), received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, and awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year, 2002, Creative Prose.Equinoxes Rouge, the French translation, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Médicis étranger, one of France’s top literary awards.
Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK, 2005), a collection of poetry and prose, rails against lost lands and lovers, heralds death and mad warriors, and celebrates a doomed love affair between Hollywood’s invented characters: “Noble Savage” and “Indian Sports Mascot”. This collection of lyric and prose poems won the Oklahoma States Book Award in 2005. Portions of the book were featured in the third edition of The World Is a Text(Prentice Hall, 2008) by Jonathan Silverman and Dean Rader.
Miko Kings, an Indian baseball novel set in Ada, Oklahoma in 1907 and also 1969 and 2006, was published in 2007 by Aunt Lute Books. The story centers on Choctaw journalist Lena Coulter and on Hope Little Leader, the Choctaw pitcher who had the most contorted windup in Indian baseball history. Other characters are slugger Blip Bleen, catcher Batteries Goingsnake, first baseman Lucius Mummy, also known as “the barrel” and Ezol Day, a Choctaw postal clerk in Indian Territory who tries to patent her Choctaw theory of relativity and inadvertently changes the course of history for the Indians and their baseball team. “This is where the ‘twentieth-century Indian’ really begins”, says Henri Day, “not in the abstractions of Congressional Acts—but on the prairie diamond.”
Though she is best known for her fiction, Howe is also an accomplished scholar. She has authored a book chapter on Choctaw history, contributed two important essays on her theory of “tribalography”, and collaborated on literary criticism projects with Craig Howe (no relation), Harvey Markowitz, and Dean Rader. Howe has been a visiting professor at Carleton College, Grinnell College, Sinte Gleska University in Mission, South Dakota, on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, and at the University of Cincinnati in the Women’s Studies Department. In 2003 she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia. In 2006-07 she was the John and Renee Grisham’s Writer-in-Residence, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS. In May 2008, Howe was awarded a Poetry Fellowship at Soul Mountain Retreat, sponsored by former Connecticut poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson in East Haddam, Connecticut. In March 2010, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story was the 2009-10 Read-in Selection for Hampton University, Hampton VA. Hampton University also held a mini-literary conference on Miko Kings. Ten papers and 3 panel discussions were given on the novel during the conference. In March 2011, Howe was awarded the Tulsa Library Trust’s “American Indian Author Award” at the Central Library, Tulsa Oklahoma.
In 2010-2011, Howe was a J. William Fulbright Scholar in Amman, Jordan where she taught American Indian and American literatures at theUniversity of Jordan, Amman. She was also researching a new novel set in both Transjordan, 1917 and in Allen, Oklahoma, 2011. Currently Howe is a Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in American Indian Studies, English, and Theater.
Students who have worked with Howe have gone on to work for the Chicago Sun Times, and The New York Times. They are both native and non natives who have published memoir, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Some former students are now working in professional theater companies, while others are teachers.
In 2012 Ms. Howe was the recipient of a United States Artists Fellow award.
North Texas Giving Day
Join us and thousands of other North Texas in support of the many nonprofits supporting your community!
North Texas Giving Day is an online giving event that provides nonprofits the opportunity to gain exposure to — and start relationships with — new donors, and for people in North Texas to come together to raise as much money as possible for local nonprofits.
Help us support the literary arts community in Dallas by donating!
2013 Results
- $25.2 Million raised (including matching funds and prizes)
- 75,000+ total number of gifts
- 1,351 nonprofits received donations
- 26% of donations were first-time givers to the nonprofit
Arte de las Americas Fest
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Peter Anderson and Alex Lemon
In Salon: Peter Anderson and Alex Lemon
When: Thursday, October 2, 7 pm
Where: Private Home, RSVP: 214-838-3554 or wordspace@wordspace.us
Refreshments served: Thank you to Spiral Diner and Ben E. Keith!
Please join us for an evening of new works by exciting writers Peter Anderson and Alex Lemon.
Peter Anderson hails from South Africa, but currently resides in North Texas where he is an associate professor of English at Austin College. The author of a previous collection of poems, Vanishing Ground, his work in fiction and poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines and has been anthologized in both America and South Africa. The Unspeakable is his first novel.
Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir and four poetry collections: Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts and most recently, The Wish Book. An essay collection is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His writing has appeared in Esquire, American Poetry Review, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Kenyon Review, AGNI, New England Review, The Southern Reviewand jubilat, among others. Among his awards are a 2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is an editor-at-large for Saturnalia Books, the poetry editor of descant and frequently writes book reviews for the Dallas Morning News. He lives in Ft. Worth, Texas, and teaches at TCU. He has a cool website too. Click Here.
Spiral Diner owner, Sara Tomerlin.
Spiral Diner & Bakery opened its door on August 21, 2002. But first, let’s go back a little further than that. The founder of Spiral Diner & Bakery, Amy McNutt, while making a short film about factory-farmed cows in California she learned about the heartless practices of the dairy and egg industries. Overnight this experience turned the long time vegetarian into a vegan. Amy began to research and study the plight of animals, soon extending her studies to environmentalism as well. She began to take part in educational activism and tried her best to keep an open dialogue with people about Veganism and its relation to the environment. In doing this she discovered that most people, once they have a total understanding of Veganism, agree it’s a necessary step for survival on this planet. However, they have difficulty changing their lifestyles for lack of access to information and most importantly, GOOD VEGAN FOOD. So, after a year of working in the film industry Amy decided to move on to her other love: Food. In an attempt to provide delicious cruelty-free and organic food to those who need it most she left L.A. and moved back home to Texas where she opened Spiral Diner in Fort Worth.
The original location was a small lunch counter at the Fort Worth Rail Market in downtown. There was only 800 square feet of kitchen space, 5 employees, and less than ten items on the menu! After being open a few months Amy and James started dating and after only two months they got hitched. Turns out that James was an old school vegan foodie himself so he quit his lucrative job as a bounty hunter and immediately joined Amy to help run Spiral.
After a year and a half at the Rail Market Spiral was bursting at the seams. The customer base was growing and growing and they were running out of space in the kitchen. They needed a bigger and better place. With financial support from Amy’s wonderful mom and many regular customers who came on board as lenders the move to Magnolia was on. They found an old gutted building in the Near Southside and along with the landlord’s help were able to fix it up. And on their second anniversary Spiral Diner Fort Worth was born anew. With fancy new digs and expanded menu Spiral quickly became a Fort Worth institution and a destination for vegan travelers. All the while they kept a great core crew of employees that stuck with them through thick and thin. In 2007 Spiral pulled off a real coup: The little vegan restaurant in Cowtown, TX was awarded Best Vegetarian Restaurant in America by VegNews magazine!
(That’s right, Texas!).
In 2006, Sara Tomerlin, a recent TCU grad and longtime Spiral employee decided she wanted to share good vegan food with the rest of DFW and she asked if she could open a Spiral Diner in Dallas. Since Sara’s the best, Amy said “yes”. In February of 2008, after two long years of planning and location hunting, Spiral Diner Dallas opened its doors. Located in a beautiful old neighborhood in Oak Cliff, Spiral Dallas has quickly become a second home for many locals and for the 20 employees who work so hard to make the place awesome.
In January of 2008 Spiral Fort Worth’s wonderful and amazing longtime manager, Lindsey Akey, took over ownership of Spiral Fort Worth. Lindsey’s supernatural work ethic and brains for miles make Spiral Fort Worth awesome. As does the positivity and hard work of our 20 Fort Worth employees who work their little butts off every day in the name of good vegan food and
cool customers.
Today, Amy and James still own and run the company as benevolent overlords while Lindsey and Sara own and run their respective locations. This allows them have more time to work on recipes, teach cooking classes, work on filmmaking and plan the opening of an art house theater in Fort Worth. They love their customers and co-workers who have given them the opportunity to do what they love most… save animals and watch movies!
Spiral Diner & Bakery is a 100% vegan and mostly organic restaurant in the middle of “Cowtown” (Ft. Worth). In addition to always serving delicious vegan meals that appeal to both herbivores and carnivores, Spiral Diner pledges to:
WordSpace @ Oak Cliff Cultural Center Block Party
When: Saturday, August 9th
Where: Block Party! Jefferson Blvd, Oak Cliff
Who: Next Generation
Join us in celebrating the 4th Anniversary of the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, home of our Oak Cliff Next Generation free writing and performance workshops. Staffed by Rafael Tamayo, Tisha Crear and Gerardo Robles this facility near the Texas Theater provides the neighborhood with a huge cultural impact. Gallery exhibitions, monthly Verse and Rhythm events, kids camps and so much more.
It’s a Block Party with dancers, performances, vendors, food, and more-See ya there!
WordSpace Season KickOff Party @ The Wild Detectives
You are invited to join WordSpace board of directors and staff to celebrate the unveiling of our 2014-15 season.
We’ll be having drawings for a WordSpace t-shirt and 2 tickets to see…who?
When: Monday, September 8, @ 7 pm
Where: The Wild Detectives
Who: The Whole Wordspace Gang
Free Appetizers will be served.
Cash Bar.
