The Reading Room

RE@DS
Fridays at 5:30 in The Reading Room
RE@DS is included with L@TE admission

Fall 2014 RE@DS guest programmer Genine Lentine is the author of Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model (Kelly’s Cove Press), Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes (New Michigan Press), and Found Dharma Talks (Missing Links Press). Recent work appears in The Baffler, Funk & Wag, and the PEN Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from University of Arizona Poetry Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Montalvo Arts Center. She teaches privately and at San Francisco Art Institute.

Lentine writes, “In trying to pinpoint the essential quality of the writing I keep close at hand, I recently coined the term “avant morte.” I reserve this term for writers who inhabit life with such astonishing courage, resilience, tenderness—and aplomb—it seems they’ve already come through death. To read their work is to learn what it takes to live. Here are twelve such poets and writers.”

September 26, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lucy Corin & Alix Lambert
October 17, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Gabrielle Calvocoressi & Maggie Nelson
October 24, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Brian Teare & Rocket Caleshu
November 7, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Frances Richard & Ronaldo Wilson
November 14, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Amina Cain & Sean Labrador Y Manzano
November 21, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: RJ Ingram & Solmaz Sharif

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RE@DS
Programmed by Joshua Merchant and Jane Gregory
Followed by L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA events

This spring, guest programmers Joshua Merchant and Jane Gregory have lined up a remarkable array of writers to read from their work on alternate Fridays. East Oakland spoken word artist and poet Joshua Merchant, who has performed facilitated workshops at Ohio Wesleyan and Williams College, has selected young Bay Area poets who work in different mediums and relationships with “the word.” Merchant writes, “I believe that poetry is a cathartic process for both writer and audience. The space shared between poets and listeners is a sacred one. Think of it as being invited into someone’s favorite area in a park that most don’t know about. Share some kindling. Spark a bundle of wood. Have a bonfire.” Jane Gregory holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently working towards a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Her book My Enemies was published by the Song Cave in 2013. For RE@DS, Gregory has invited fellow UC Berkeley graduate students to present their creative work.

March 7, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Natasha Huey & Jose Vadi
March 14, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Rebecca Gaydos & Samia Rahimtoola
April 4, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Jasmine Sufi & Leo Bryant
April 11, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Gillian Osborne & Simona Schneider
April 18, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Jari Bradley & Jazz Hudson
April 25, 2014	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Jocelyn Saidenberg & Michelle Ty

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RE@DS
Programmed by Julien Poirier and Serena Le
Followed by L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA events

Julien Poirier and Serena Le program alternate Fridays for the Fall 2013 season of RE@DS. Poirier writes that many of the poets he has invited “are friends and collaborators working together, solo, on a vibrant self-dramatizing group poem with many trap doors and racing sails.” Serena Le has invited current graduate students to read in The Reading Room. “For each writer,” she says, “the seeming boundaries of scholarship and poetry approach improbable fluidities, exhilarating distinctions. To posit, to perceive, to differentiate, to re-entangle—theirs is both a poetry and a persistence, a patience for the future of thought and language that refuses to undermine its most valuable uncertainties.”

September 13, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Garrett Caples & Filip Marinovich
September 20, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Mary Wilson & David Vandeloo
October 11, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Elizabeth Reddin & Rod Roland
October 18, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Christopher Miller & Jane Gregory
November 8, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Ava Koohbor & Jackson Meazle
November 15, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Claire Marie Stancek & Lynn Xu
December 13, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Jaime Cortez, Sara Larson, Serena Le, Julien Poirier

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RE@DS
Programmed by Sara Larsen
Followed by L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA events

Sara Larsen, our guest RE@DS programmer for the spring, is a poet living in Oakland. Her most recent books are The Hallucinated; A,a,a,a,a; and Merry Hell. All Revolutions will be Fabulous is forthcoming in 2013. Larsen writes, “I curated this series to include women, women-identified, and gender-queer writers whose work plays with, defies, and redefines the poem. The work by these incredible writers can be both fierce and full of love, expert with form, but also with the ability to allow a falling-apart-ness. Any boundary is subject to question, liable to liminality. Enjoy.”

March 8, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lauren Levin & Jennifer Manzano
March 22, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lauren Shufran & Sirama Bajo
April 12, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Zoe Tuck & Wendy Trevino
April 26, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Youth Speaks EVENT CANCELED
May 3, 2013	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lindsey Boldt & Cheena Marie Lo

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RE@DS
Programmed by Jaime Cortez
Followed by L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA events

Bay Area writer and visual artist Jaime Cortez, our guest RE@DS programmer for November and December, selected writers for our series who “believe that the right words, the right story, have a corrective, clarifying mojo in them. The mojo might be mighty or not-so-mighty, but they are irresistibly compelled to deploy it. They will use their language with all the invention, ferocity, and honesty they can conjure.”

November 2, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Franck André Jamme
November 9, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Tisa Bryant
November 16, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano
December 7, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Sam Sax

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RE@DS
Programmed by David Brazil
Followed by L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA events

Join us for the fall 2012 season of RE@DS in The Reading Room. Guest programmer David Brazil has invited established local poets both to read from their work and to share the stage with another writer of their choice, whose work is sympathetic to their own. This four-part series sheds light on the ecologies, alliances, and transmissions that form the basis for so much of what is most valuable in contemporary writing.

September 14, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Norma Cole & Sara Wintz
September 28, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Kevin Killian & Andrew Kenower
October 12, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lyn Hejinian & Yosefa Raz
October 19, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: David Meltzer & Julie Rogers

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RE@DS
Programmed by Suzanne Stein and David Brazil
Followed by L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA events

The vibrancy of the contemporary Bay Area writing community emerges from a long tradition of artistic and literary interdisciplinary attention, and this reading series highlights that generational continuity. We loved learning that the opening celebration of the Berkeley Art Museum in 1970 included performances by Robert Duncan, William Wiley, and Anna Halprin, and it’s in that spirit we’ve organized our program. For this series, we invited eight younger writers to present their own work in the context of another writer or artist who has been a source of inspiration and excitement for them. Expect these events, which are part of The Reading Room project, to be two parts performance and one part conversation.

January 27, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Jackqueline Frost
February 10, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Tom Comitta
February 24, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Monica Peck
March 9, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Christian Nagler
March 16, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Ariel Goldberg
March 23, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Brian Ang
April 13, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Ted Rees
May 9, 2012	7:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Suzanne Stein and David Brazil
May 11, 2012	5:30 p.m.	RE@DS: Lara Durback