Great Beer and Poetry: The Cascadia After Party

Great Beer and Poetry: The Cascadia After Party
Saturday, March 24, 9:30 p.m. at SPLAB

Suggested donation $5.00. (Free to Gold Pass holders. Register here.)

Breadline and Richard Hugo House, home of the popular “Cheap Wine and Poetry” Series, combine forces to present Great Beer and Poetry, a reading and after party for Cascadia, SPLAB’s festival on Northwest poetics.The reading and party features a whole slew of Northwest poets,

Greg Bem

including Ed Skoog, Dan Raphael, Jack Remick, Doug Nufer, Daemond Arrindell and Nicole Hardy, readings poems inspired by the Northwest, plus free beer provided by Elysian Brewing Company.

Brian McGuigan

It is being curated by Brian McGuigan and Greg Bem.

Jesse Minkert

Jesse Minkert‘s father taught art classes in Texas. At the age of twelve Jesse was one of his first students. He got a BFA as a painter and an MA as a sculptor, but between the two degrees was a gap of about eleven years during which he worked as a sign painter, a picture framer, a patternmaker for a foundry, a wood carver, and a hot tub installer. After the MA he moved to Seattle and developed diabetic retinopathy, a cause of blindness. He began working on arts access for blind and visually impaired people. This new path moved him toward writing, first plays for theater and radio, and then short stories and novels. He hung out with poets at the Red Sky Poetry Theatre. He read his microstories at open mics, which led to a chapbook, Shortness of Breath & Other Symptoms, published under the Wood Works imprint. He was a mainstage reader at Burning Word in 2011. His work appears in Harpur Palate, The Writing Disorder, Tattoo Highway, DMQ Review, Chantarellle’s Notebook, and Snakeskin. Each summer Minkert works with visually impaired school kids to produce radio plays and PSAs from his original scripts.

Ed Skoog

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and the forthcoming Rough Day. He has been a writer-in-residence at the Richard Hugo House and George Washington University. His work has appeared in Paris Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, Poetry, Narrative, and the American Poetry Review.

Sharon Cumberland

Sharon Cumberland’s poetry collection, Peculiar Honors, is published by Black Heron Press. She has also published in many journals including Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Verse and  Image, among others. She won Kalliope’s Sue Saniel Elkind Award, The Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association’s Zola Award for Poetry, and the Writers Haven Press Bright Side Award.  She was a Writer in Residence at the Jack Straw Foundation and the Poet in Residence for The Seasons Music Festival in Yakima, WA. Her chapbooks are The Arithmetic of Mourning from Green Rock Press, and Greatest  Hits 1985-2000, from Pudding House Press.  She is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Seattle University.

Alex Bleecker

Alex Bleecker is a poet and teacher based in Seattle, where he works for the nonprofit 826 Seattle, and is a member of the SPLAB poetry nonprofit.  Along with Greg Bem and Jeremy Springsteed, he is a founder and curator of the monthly Breadline performance series on Capitol Hill (breadlinepoetry.wordpress.com).  In 2010 he started Respuestas, a website devoted to sharing poetic responses to Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions (nerudaproject.wordpress.com).  Alex’s poems have appeared in print and online in Brownstone Poets Anthology, Clwn Wrs, fre•quen•cy, INACTUAL, Matter, Poets for Living Waters, Shampoo, Squaw Valley Review, et al., and he is a regular contributor to Uphook Press anthologies.  His is the author of the chapbook Found in a Cord (Poets Wear Prada Press, 2006).

Jeremy Springsteed

Jeremy Springsteed likes bread, booze, boots and boats. He does not like sleep, snitches, scabies or sobriety.

Nicole Hardy

Nicole Hardy’s memoir Fallen: Memoirs of a Latter-Day Virgin is forthcoming in 2013. She’s the author of This Blonde, a collection of poems, as well as a chapbook of sonnets titled Mud Flap Girl’s XX Guide to Facial Profiling. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, and in May of 2012 will be featured in stage adaptation to benefit Planned Parenthood. Nicole often reads in conjunction with Seattle band Willow and the Embers, with whom she plays the tambourine.

Maria Winters

After receiving her MFA in the flatlands of Chicago Maria Winters loaded up all of her belongings into a 22 ft truck named Roxanne and headed across the country towards Cascadia with her two cohorts Jeff Brennan and The Great Bemino. Together the three traversed the cornfields of Nebraska, climbed the Rockies, locked the keys in the truck in the salt flats of Nevada, and nearly disappeared in the mountain desert of Oregon. Maria has never felt more at home than here nestled between the Cascades and the Olympics amongst the sky scraping evergreens, which makes sense since she grew up on Evergreen Rd.

Matt Gano

In 2011, Matt Gano guest lectured at The Juilliard School in New York City, featured for “Page Meets Stage,” at the Bowery Poetry Club, and led writing workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.  In May of 2012, he will be featured as a panelist and performer for the Skagit River Poetry Festival.  Matt Gano has traveled internationally teaching creative writing and performance in Seoul, Korea, and in 2009 earned a three-month artist residency at the Lee Shau Kee, School of Creativity in Hong Kong. He has worked as a national slam team coach and workshop instructor for Youth Speaks Seattle and is now a senior Artist in Residence with Seattle Arts and Lectures, Writers in the Schools.

Daemond Arrindel

Daemond Arrindell is the Slam Master of Seattle and producer of the longest running weekly show in Seattle – the Seattle Poetry Slam. Daemond is a 5-time coach of the Seattle National Poetry Slam Team, currently ranked 6th in the nation. He is a workshop facilitator, community organizer, advocate and poet – and holds strong to the belief that poetry is a grand tree with a vast array of branches that all contribute to the complexity of the art form. And it is the challenge of the artist to continue to push him/herself to grow within it. Daemond’s love for the craft of poetry and the art of spoken word and their ability to alter the emotional state of a listener knows no bounds.

Raanan David

Ra’anan David was born in Israel and started writing infantile so-called “poems” as a child.  The older bullies recognized his talent by twisting his arm during school breaks, demanding him to make a rhyme about this or that person, release him after he did, then chase him and start the process all over again. He moved to the US in 1985 and lived in Seattle ever since, residing in Columbia City since 1990. Ra’anan finally left his traumas behind and went back into writing after attending a “Cheap Wine and Poetry” event during Bumbershoot in September of 2008.  He went up on the stage, poured himself some wine, and claims he had an epiphany of some sort.  The Jewish version.  Much to his surprise he is now writing exclusively in English, hoping the childhood bullies will never notice.  His favorite subjects are food, soccer, sex, and gender identity, though not always in this order. Ra’anan is happily divorced yet quite desperate, and more-then-readily-available to be taken advantage of by predatory members of the opposite camp.

Cristen Miller

Cristin Miller grew up studying classical piano, eventually leading her to Vassar College for composition and UCSC, where she began studying voice and jazz improvisation while earning a degree in literature and creative writing. Currently residing in Seattle, she has been involved extensively with the improvised and experimental music community, performing with Seattle-based artists in various contexts and formal collaborations including: Murderous Copulation of Birds, Emma Zunz, and an ongoing collaboration with dancer Tobi Nussbaum supported by Studio Current. Cristin is working on the second release for her current solo project, Stella Haze, which combines voice, electronics, and composition.

Doug Nufer

Doug Nufer is the author of 6 or 12 novels in print or in/out of print and a poetry collection.  His most recent work is a long poem about SE King County, The Dammed, which is neither in nor out of print but is available on-line as an ubu.com unpublishable editions book.

Larry Crist

Larry Crist grew up in the California wine country, moving constantly with his school teaching mother before settling in Humboldt County, CA. where he dropped out of high school and later went on to earn a BA at HSU. He also attended Temple U earning an MFA in theatre arts. Besides Philadelphia, Larry has lived in Chicago, Houston, London and now makes his home in Seattle where he lives with his wife and cat. He has been widely published. Some of his favorite publications are Pearl, Slipstream, Rattle, Dos Passos Review, Alimentum, Evening Street Review, Floating Bridge Press. His poems also appear regularly in Real Change, Seattle’s Homeless Newspaper.

Arlene Kim, a Korean-American writer, received a BA in literature from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. She grew up

Arlene Kim

on the east coast of the U.S. and now lives & writes on the west coast. For her collection What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? (Milkweed Editions, 2011), she was chosen as one of Poets & Writers 2012 debut poets. She lives in Seattle where she reads for the online poetry journal the DMQ Review and writes poems, prose, and bits in between.

Sara Brickman

Sara Brickman is an author, performance artist, and the 2011 Seattle Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion. Her manuscript of poems, “Houdini’s Daughter,” has been a two time finalist in Write Bloody Publishing’s annual manuscript competition. Sara performs nationwide and was showcased at the 2010 Individual World Poetry Slam Finals. A member of the 2011 Seattle Poetry Slam team and two time finalist at the Seattle Grand Slam, she works at the literary arts center Richard Hugo House, and has taught poetry, performance, and creative non-fiction at the Bent Writing Insititute, Richard Hugo House, and elsewhere. In 2010 she founded a multimedia performance series in her living room called the Hootenanny, which has showcased nationally known artists such as Mighty Mike Mcgee, Led To Sea, Jon Sands, Karen Finneyfrock, and more. Her work has been published in literary journals such as Bestiary Magazine and Hoarse.  She would really enjoy doing the robot with you.

Rebecca Hoogs

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of a chapbook, “Grenade” (2005) and her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2004) and Artist Trust of Washington State (2005). She is the Director of Education Programs and the curator and host for the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures.

Katie Ogle

Katharine Ogle was reared and feared in Virginia until she moved to Seattle several years ago. She writes poetry and works as a teacher, journalist, editor, caregiver, tutor and personal shopper.