Reading October 14th at 7:30PM feat. Thomas Sayers Ellis

Hello southern writing friends,

Thanks to all who turned out for last month’s fall kickoff! This month I’m very excited to announce Thomas Sayers Ellis will grace the Southern Writers Reading Series microphone with poetry and presence!!

Please bring your listening ears to Happy Ending Lounge (302 Broome Street) on Wednesday October 14th to hear five talented authors bring a taste of the South to Manhattan.

Ama Codjoe was born in Texas with roots in Memphis and Accra. In addition to poems Ama moves in dances and as an educator. She is the poetry teaching artist for the A.C.T.I.O.N. Project in the Bronx, a social justice and arts program for high school aged youth. She believes that art is transformational, that for seconds at a time quality poems earthquake under our feet, that words (read and spoken) soak-in and dye us, that love is the only important something. Ama still writes letters. She is an emerging poet and a Cave Canem fellow. Her reading in this series is dedicated to her southern mother.

Cavan Hallman hails from the state that is both southernmost and least Southern– Florida (our chief export being Weird). He is a writer of drama and fiction, an actor, and director– his plays for children having received over 10,000 performances. Tonight he will be reading satirical fiction.

Randall Horton is the author of The Definition of Place, and the The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, both from Main Street Rag. He is the co-editor of Fingernails Across the Chalkboard Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDs from the Black Diaspora (Third World Press, 2007). Randall also has a MFA in poetry from Chicago State University and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Albany. He teaches at the University of New Haven.

Sommer Browning drew poems and wrote comix in Virginia before moving to Brooklyn. She has chapbooks from horse less press and Cannibal Books and one co-written with Brandon Shimoda called THE BOWLING, on it’s way from Greying Ghost Press. Mind her own business at asthmachronicles.blogspot.com.

Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C. His first full collection The Maverick Room was published by Graywolf Press in 2005, for which he received a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. The collection is “marked by inner-city youth culture energy that is part lyrical narrative, part ‘Parliament Funkadelic,’ a blend of chaos and control through the sheer and simple power of words” (Midwest Review). He is also the author of The Good Junk (Take Three #1, Graywolf 1996); a chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001); and the chaplet Song On (WinteRed Press 2005). His Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series. He is a contributing editor to Callaloo and Poets and Writers Magazine.


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