Pop-Up Lit Fest – Thurs, Nov. 10

Thursday, November 10, 2016 4:30 PM EST

On Thursday, Nov. 10, the creative writing program will offer a rare opportunity to meet and talk with editors, hear from publishing writers, and mix and mingle with other members of the Mason writer community, all in one afternoon and evening. 

Overview:

            -Editors panel, 4:30, Room 1202 Merten Hall, featuring editors from some of the best literary journals and presses in America

            -Reception, 7:15, JC top floor, West alcove

            -Poetry reading, 7:30, JC Room E, Combined readings by Steven Church, non ction visiting writer, and poet Cole Swensen, Mason’s own Jennifer Atkinson, poet and editor Jon Thompson, and French poet Nicolas Pesques.

 The editors panel features Jeffery Gleaves from The Paris Review; Ariel Lewiton with Guernica: a magazine of art and politics; Nate Brown with American Short Fiction; Steven Church from The Normal School: a literary magazine; plus Thompson from Free Verse Editions, and Swensen, who with David St. John edited W.W. Norton’s 2009 anthology American Hybrid. Panelists will talk about their experiences as writers and editors, and will offer practical advice for writers from their editors’ perspective.

 

The readings—both at 7:30 in the Johnson Center Meeting Room E are on the fourth floor of the JC. At 7:15, we will have a joint reception for those attending the readings. It also will be on the fourth floor of the JC, in the alcove midway the west side of the building, not far from rooms F&E.

 

Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, and the forthcoming books, Ultrasonic and Jumping Into the Cage: Encounters with the Savage and the Sublime. His essays have been published in Passages North, DIAGRAM, Brevity, River Teeth, The Rumpus, AGNI, The Pedestrian, Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Terrain.org, and others.

 

Poets Swensen and Pesques are visiting Mason during a mini reading tour to promote Overyellow: The Poem as Installation Art  (in French), part of a series that Pesquès has been writing for 25 years. The series began with a mountain that he sees outside his study window in the Ardèche region of France. Parlor Press says, “Pesquès uses an evocation of nature to reflect upon the nature of language and its tendency to separate us from immanent experience. The overyellow of the title refers to the brilliant color of the fragrant English broom that flowers all over the mountain every June. Subtle inter-relations of various powers, from the personal to the universal, create a meditative weave that accommodates both vivid imagery and philosophical speculation.”

 

Swensen, who translates Pesques work into English, is the author of 13 books of poetry, including most recently Gravesend, and a book of essays Noise that Stays Noise. She also is the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid, and the founder and editor of La Presse, a nano-press dedicated to contemporary French work in translation. She currently teaches at Brown University.

 

Free Verse Editions, which Thompson edits, is an international poetry series that lists more than 40 writers (http://www.parlorpress.com/freeverse/index.html). He also edits the online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, which since 2001 has published a number of both distinguished and up-and-coming poets  (http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/). Thompson is himself the author of three books of poetry, including Landscape With Light and The Book of the Floating World, plus the essay collection After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing.

 

Jennifer Atkinson’s most recent book is The Thinking Eye, which appeared earlier this year. Her previous books include The Dogwood Tree, which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize; The Drowned City, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize; Drift Ice, and Canticle of the Night Path. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in Poetry, Field, The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Image, and elsewhere. Both her poetry and her nonfiction have been honored with Pushcart Prizes.