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NYC | March 21, 2010

We’re celebrating the arrival of spring and a special reading with writers from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at the next Sunday Salon. Join us at Jimmys 43 at 7pm!

Writers from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference bring a long-held conference tradition, Readings From The Dark Tower, to NYC. Five writers of color who reflect the complex diversity of America read from their work and answer questions about what it means to be “the first” (in a family, a country, an ethnic group), to achieve literary success.

Ru Freeman’s creative and political writing has appeared internationally. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl is published in the US and Canada by Atria/Simon & Schuster by Viking in the UK, Australia and India, in translation in Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil and the Netherlands and in audio by Tantor Media with award-winning narrator, Anne Flosnick.

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore to Irish and Indian parents, and grew up in Wyoming, where she still lives. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, Owen Wister Considered was produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer. She has received writerships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2005-2009. She has been nominated for Best New American Voices 2009 and her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and Forklift, Ohio. She is currently finishing a collection of short stories, Cowboys and East Indians.

Emily Raboteau is an assistant professor in the English Department at the City College of New York. She has an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she was a New York Times Fellow. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo, the Missouri Review, the Gettysburg Review, Tin House, Best American Short Stories 2003 and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2006, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Henry Holt published her first novel, The Professor’s Daughter, in 2005. The Professor’s Daughter was written in part to answer the question, “What are You?” when her answer, “”My mother is white, and my father is black” felt entirely unsatisfactory. Grove will publish her next book, Searching for Zion.

Charles Rice-González was born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx. He is a writer, community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. He holds an MFA from Goddard College. His work has been published in The Pitkin Review, Los Otros Cuerpos, the first anthology of Puerto Rican queer work, and in Best Gay Stories 2008. His plays include Los Nutcrackers: A Christmas Carajo and I Just Love Andy Gibb winner of Pregones Theater’s 2005 ASUNCION Play Series. He has been awarded writerships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2006 and 2007, a residency from the Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY and a fellowship to the Macondo Writing Workshop in summer 2009. He received an Audre Lorde scholarship in 2007 from the ZAMI Foundation and a P.R.I.D.E. Award in 1997. His debut novel, Chulito about a tough, sexy, hip hop-loving, young Latino, coming out and of age in the South Bronx, will be published by Alyson Books in April 2010 and he will edit a queer Latino Anthology that will be published by Tincture, a new imprint of Lethe Press, in September 2010. He is currently working on his second novel, Hunts Point, a look at a South Bronx neighborhood through a queer Latino lens.

Reginald Dwayne Betts was born in a city in San Diego and raised in Suitland, MD, a small city in the DC Metropolitan area. He is the National Spokesperson for the Campaign for Justice and the Program Director for the DC Creative Writing Workshop. His memoir, A Question of Freedom, shows his journey away from the neighborhoods he called home to the prison cells where he spent most of his teenage years and early 20s. The Washington Post ran a front-page profile about Dwayne and YoungMenRead, a book club he began for boys. He has also been profiled on the front page of the Baltimore Sun and has given commentary for NPR’s All Things Considered. His poetry has been widely published and he is the winner of the 2009 Beatrice Hawley Award.

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NYC | January 24, 2010-2

NYC | January 24, 7pm

Join us at Jimmy’s 43 at 43 East 7th St. b/w 2nd & 3rd Aves.

Sunday Salon will stand with Haiti on Sunday, January 24 by collecting monetary donations for  Stand With Haiti – Partners in Health, a solid, on-the-ground organization already in high gear helping the rescue and recovery effort. And while the best thing you can give right now is money, if you want to donate goods, we encourage you to consider assembling a hygiene or baby kit for Church World Service. Here’s how. Or if you have skills needed & want to volunteer, you can register with the Center for International Disaster Information. Also, scroll down to the end of this post to read about other fundraising events in NYC this week and next.

Our fabulous and lovely readers:

Suzanne Wise is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of the Subjunctive. More recently, her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and From the Fishouse and in the journals American Letters and Commentary, Guernica, and Quarter After Eight.

Rob Jacklosky’s comic essays, (“Dispatches from the Napoleonic Wars,” and “Dispatches from the Wings of the ABT”) have appeared for the last couple of years in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His essay, “A Version of Me on Network T.V.” was chosen by Phillip Lopate as a winner of a WNYC contest. His short stories have appeared in Sonora Review, Sendero, Konundrum Literary Engine Review and The Foghorn Magazine. In 2007, his unpublished novel Nazi in the Living Room was a finalist in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom fiction competition, work-in-progress category. He was a top-15 finalist in the New Century Writers Award for the unpublished first chapters of Cheerio, Idiot.

KC Trommer’s poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Coconut, MARGIE, Octopus, Poetry East, The Sycamore Review, and other journals. A graduate of the MFA program at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize, as well as fellowships from the Maine Summer Arts Program, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Prague Summer Program. Her sound and video work can be accessed via www.kctrommer.com. She lives in New York with her husband, the writer Justin Courter.

Justin Courter is the author of the novel Skunk: A Love Story, and a collection of prose poems, The Death of the Poem and Other Paragraphs. He is married to his fellow Sunday Salon reader, the fabulous poet KC Trommer.

SALON STANDS WITH HAITI
Here are some other events happening in NYC this week & next raising funds for Haiti:

Friday, January 15, 6pm-8:30pm
New Yorkers for Haiti
Talay, 701 West 135th St. at 12th Ave.

Sunday, January 17, 10pm-4am
Unity Sound Reggae Sundays MLK Edition/Fundraiser for Haiti Earthquake Victims
Deity, 368 Atlantic Ave. btw Hoyt & Bond, Brooklyn
Join us this Sunday and pledge your love and support for Haiti’s earthquake relief efforts. Music by Haiti’s own DJ Hard Hittin Harry, Special guest: Natural Freaks. Dancehall reggae, roots & culture, with a touch of soca calypso, Hatian compas, world beat and much more. Portion of the proceeds to benefit Helping Hands Bring Sunshine & Rural Haiti Project.

Monday, January 18, 9pm-2am
Music for Medicine
Sputnik, 262 Taffe Place, Brooklyn
An emergency show for Earthquake relief in HAITI featuring: Kongo (traditional Haitian roots band), Jeremiah Hosea (soul vocals & bass=earthdriver.org rep), DJ Chela (Zulu Nation), DJ Oja (Sunchild Productions/earthdriver.org) & more. 9pm-2am. All proceeds benefit Doctors Without Borders and Yele.

Friday, January 22, 6:30pm-9pm
I Am Ayiti (Haiti) Relief Fundraiser and Benefit
Caribbean Cultural Center
408 W. 58th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues)
212-30-7420 ext. 3008
www.cccadi.org
Minimum Donation $10 but feel free to donate more! Featuring performances by: DJ Laylo on the 1s and 2s, Kalunga Neg Mawon, Tiga Jean-Baptiste & T’Chaka, & Jhon Clarke (formerly of Black Parents)

And a list of some of our favorite organizations helping the relief efforts. Want to know more about a charity before you donate? Check out greatnonprofits.org for first-hand reviews.

  • AARP (providing matching donations up to $500K for aid to older victims)
  • ActionAid USA
  • American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
  • American Jewish World Service
  • American National Red Cross
  • Americares
  • CARE
  • Catholic Relief Services
  • Clinton Foundation
  • Direct Relief International
  • Disasters Emergency Committee (UK)
  • Doctors Without Borders
  • Habitat for Humanity
  • International Medical Corps
  • Medical Teams International
  • Mercy Corps
  • Operation Blessing International
  • Operation USA
  • Oxfam America
  • Parners in Health
  • Plan USA
  • Save the Children
  • Stand With Haiti
  • US Fund for UNICEF
  • Week of Compassion
  • World Concern
  • World Vision

Help Fill Sunday Salon’s Balikbayan Box for Typhoon Victims!

Please help the victims in the Philippines who have been directly impacted by devastating typhoons. The people of Caba, a small fishing town in La Union Province, have been affected by the second major typhoon to hit the Philippines last month.We will be sending, in true Filipino style, a ‘balikbayan box’ (or an extra-large cardboard box filled to capacity containing various comfort items then shipped directly to the Philippines by a specialized freight service for a flat fee).  

A donation ‘balikbayan box’ will be set up at the Sunday Salon, November 15th. Please help by donating any basic items that you can spare (see list below). 

Our contact in the barangay, or barrio, of Caba is Pete Gonzales, a Filipino-American painter / musician, who after over forty years of living in the US, decided to move back to the Philippines to manage a small family business of vacation guest houses, which employs many of the people from the village. Since the severe flooding began, Mr. Gonzales has been reaching out to anyone who can help in his effort to provide relief to his local community. He will receive and distribute any donated items to assure proper distribution to those in the most need.

*Rice is by far the most important staple, but any of the below items will help and be greatly appreciated.*

Food:

  • Rice (5lb bags)
  • Canned goods: proteins such as Vienna sausages, corned beef, cans of corn beef, Spam, pork and beans, sardines
  • Instant noodles such as Top Ramen cup-o-noodles
  • Instant drinks such as coffee, Taster’s Choice,Nescafe, powdered milk

Clothing: (Any summer items that you need to purge?)

  • Mens S-L, Womens XS-L. Children – All sizes 
  • T-shirts 
  • Shorts
  • New underwear
  • Light pants / jeans
  • Flip-Flops 
  • Shoes

Other items:

  • Bandages
  • Hydrogen peroxide
  • Betadine
  • Pain relievers
  • For children: coloring books, crayons, candy, small toys

Below is an additional list from The Philippine National Red Cross:

  • Food items: Rice, noodles, canned goods, sugar, iodized salt, cooking oil, monggo beans
  • Medicines: Paracetamol, antibiotics, analgesic, oral rehydration salts, multivitamins and medications to treat diarrheal diseases
  • Non-food items: Bath soaps, face towels, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, plastic mats, blankets, mosquito nets, jerry cans, water containers, water purification tablets, plastic sheeting, and laundry soap

If you want to send items directly to Caba, you may send to the following address:

Mr. Pete Gonzales
Paiko Shores Resort
Barangay, San Carlos
Caba, La Union, Philippines

Thank you in advance for helping the people of Caba, La Union, and special thanks to thanks to writer Erica Miguel for bridging us to the community of Cabo!

Exquisite Corpse: Dec. 6th Writers’ Workshop with Andrei Codrescu

andreicodrescu Sunday Salon is thrilled to welcome writer Andrei Codrescu for a special writers’ workshop and reading event, both free and open to the public, on Sunday, December 6, 2009 from 4-6pm at Jimmy’s No. 43 at 43 E. 7th St. (btw 2 & 3 Ave.) in Manhattan!

Workshop Description:

Writing exquisite corpses on paper, fruit, and skin with Andrei Codrescu. Participants should bring a fine point magic marker and a writeable fruit (no oranges, they’re too bumpy). Session will be podcast from corpse.org.

(And feel free to bring laptop/questions!)

Andrei Codrescu is senior commentator on National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered, the national news-magazine he has contributed to for 25 years (www.npr.org). The listenership for ATC has grown from six million listeners in 1983 when he started to twenty-three million listeners today. While he was never off the air for longer than six weeks, there has recently been an upswell of interest in his consistently radical and demythicising work, and NPR has decided to air his essays regularly every Wednesday. Andrei Codrescu’s work in radio is complemented by film: his documentary movie, Road Scholar (which was also a book published in both hardcover and paper by Hyperion) had wide theatrical distribution, and the nationally broadcast PBS version won a Peabody Award.

Andrei is also a novelist: The Blood Countess (Simon & Schuster, a national best-seller in both hardcover and paper), Messiah, Casanova in Bohemia, and Wakefield have sold well, received a good deal of critical attention, and were translated in a number of languages. Andrei is also a poet and an essayist, the author of monographs and scholarly essays on diverse subjects (see codrescu.com). He is the editor of Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Life & Letters, online at www.corpse.org, and MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge.

In addition to the Peabody Award, he is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, the Ovidius Prize, and the Towson University Literature Prize. For a list of his published work, work in other media, and live appearances, there is more at www.codrescu.com.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. with public funds from The New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency.

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{SALON NYC RECENT WRITERS}

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts was born in a city in San Diego and raised in Suitland, MD, a small city in the DC Metropolitan area. He is the National Spokesperson for the Campaign for Justice and the Program Director for the DC Creative Writing Workshop. His memoir, A Question of Freedom, shows his journey away from the neighborhoods he called home to the prison cells where he spent most of his teenage years and early 20s. The Washington Post ran a front-page profile about Dwayne and YoungMenRead, a book club he began for boys. He has also been profiled on the front page of the Baltimore Sun and has given commentary for NPR’s All Things Considered. His poetry has been widely published and he is the winner of the 2009 Beatrice Hawley Award.

Charles Rice-Gonzalez

Charles Rice-González was born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx. He is a writer, community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. He holds an MFA from Goddard College. His work has been published in The Pitkin Review, Los Otros Cuerpos, the first anthology of Puerto Rican queer work, and in Best Gay Stories 2008. His plays include Los Nutcrackers: A Christmas Carajo and I Just Love Andy Gibb winner of Pregones Theater’s 2005 ASUNCION Play Series. He has been awarded writerships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2006 and 2007, a residency from the Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY and a fellowship to the Macondo Writing Workshop in summer 2009. He received an Audre Lorde scholarship in 2007 from the ZAMI Foundation and a P.R.I.D.E. Award in 1997. His debut novel, Chulito about a tough, sexy, hip hop-loving, young Latino, coming out and of age in the South Bronx, will be published by Alyson Books in April 2010 and he will edit a queer Latino Anthology that will be published by Tincture, a new imprint of Lethe Press, in September 2010. He is currently working on his second novel, Hunts Point, a look at a South Bronx neighborhood through a queer Latino lens.

Nina McConigley

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore to Irish and Indian parents, and grew up in Wyoming, where she still lives. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, Owen Wister Considered was produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer. She has received writerships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2005-2009. She has been nominated for Best New American Voices 2009 and her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and Forklift, Ohio. She is currently finishing a collection of short stories, Cowboys and East Indians.

Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman’s creative and political writing has appeared internationally. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl is published in the US and Canada by Atria/Simon & Schuster by Viking in the UK, Australia and India, in translation in Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil and the Netherlands and in audio by Tantor Media with award-winning narrator, Anne Flosnick.

Hettie Jones

Hettie Jones is a poet and prose writer, author of How I Became Hettie Jones, a memoir of the “beat scene” of the fifties and sixties, currently available in a paperback edition from Grove Press. Jones’s short prose has been published in journals such as Fence, Global City Review and Ploughshares, and she has also written numerous books for children and young adults. In 1998 Jones’s poetry collection, Drive, was issued by Hanging Loose Press. Drive won the Poetry Society of America’s 1999 Norma Farber First Book Award. Jones’s second collection, All Told, was published in 2003. Her third collection, Doing 70, appeared in March 2007 and Marie Ponsot writes in Commonweal, “tuneful poems…centered and engaged….I know of no other poet’s voice so at ease in welcoming the fact that we are all people of color, “looking/for bread but asking/ for roses.” Jones teaches currently in the Graduate Writing Program of the New School and at the 92nd St. Y Poetry Center. The mother of two grown daughters, Hettie Jones lives in Manhattan’s East Village. She is currently at work on Love, H. a memoir in letters; Race Tracks, a book of linked stories; and Press Firmly, a collection of new and selected poems.

See all Salon NYC writers»

{ABOUT SALON NYC}

Nita Noveno and co-host/fellow New School grad Caroline Berger keep a refreshing blend of new and experienced literary voices on tap at Stain Bar every third Sunday of the month and online in the Sunday Salon zine.

Nita Noveno and Caroline Berger Nita Noveno is a graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program. She founded the Sunday Salon series in the summer of 2002. She has most recently been published in Lost and Found: An Anthology of Teachers Writing and Worldview and was a finalist for the Missouri Review's 2005 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize. Nita read at the July 2002 Salon.

Caroline Berger lives in up-and-coming Bed Stuy (she's waiting patiently). Her proetry (that's not a typo; she likes to make up her own genres) has appeared most recently on La Petite Zine and Pindeldyboz and in Barrow Street. She is the co-host of the Sunday Salon and once used all 7 letters in a game of Scrabble to spell e-t-i-o-l-a-t-e. She teaches writing at The New School & has recently succumb to the world of blogging: Apocalyptic Whimsy. Caroline read at the August 2002 Salon.