Reading June 10, 2009

Thank goodness the weather is finally starting to turn. Hibernators are all out of excuses for not coming out to support the lyrical, passionate, and talented southern writers who make this series possible.

I’m very pleased to announce Jeanie Thomspon, the founding editor of The Black Warrior Review, will be sharing work from her new book The Seasons Bear Us.

You won’t want to miss this exciting debut. Please come out for cool summer drinks and put your hands together for the authors below:

DeLana R.A. Dameron spends at least two hours on New York City subways commuting to and from work. Where she’s from, two hour’s travel by car could get you from her house in South Carolina to the middle of Georgia or North Carolina. What she can’t do those two hours in the car, though, is write poems about the city’s infrastructure. In truth, she sometimes dismisses the express route for longer time on the train. After her first book of poems, How God Ends Us, Dameron is working on another collection entitled Cartographer and a novel. She lives in Harlem.

Jeanie Thompson has published four collections of poetry, The Seasons Bear Us (River City Publishing, 2009), White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems (River City Publishing, 2001), Witness (Black Belt Press, 1995), and How to Enter the River (Holy Cow! Press, 1985), three chapbooks and has co-edited The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers, (University of Alabama Press, 2002) with Jay Lamar. Witness won a Benjamin Franklin Award from the Publishers Marketing Association in 1996. Her poems, interviews with writers, and critical articles have appeared in Antaeus, Crazyhorse, Ironwood, North American Review, New England Review, and Southern Review. Jeanie holds the MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was founding editor of the literary journal Black Warrior Review. She has taught at the University of New Orleans and the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, as well as in the poetry-in-the schools program in New Orleans and in Alabama. Jeanie has received Individual Artist fellowships from the Louisiana State Arts Council and the Alabama State Council on the Arts and was a Walter Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference 2000. Jeanie is founding director of the award-winning Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts organization in Montgomery.

A native of Augusta, Georgia, Rochelle Spencer is a recent recipient of a Vermont Studio Fellowship, and her fiction and non fiction appears in Cake Train, So to Speak, African American Review, Poets and Writers, Sweet Fancy Moses, New York Stories, Oxygen, and other publications. In the past, Rochelle has taught at New York University, Georgia Southern University, and Spelman College. Currently, Rochelle teaches at LaGuardia Community College.

Ronnie Yates is lovesick, broke and driftin’. Up here from Houston. Writing poems.

Hope to see many of you June 10th!

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