Five Innovative Writers from Seattle and Beyond

Friday, September 24, 2010,
7:00 – 8:30 PM
Henry Auditorium
Free

In tandem with the conference Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, sponsored by the UW and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, five writers read their innovative work.

Jeanne Heuving recently published Transducer (Chax), preceded by Incapacity (Chiasmus), which received a 2004 Book of the Year from Small Press Traffic. She is a professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell and on the graduate faculty in English at UW Seattle. She has published multiple critical works on innovative and avant garde writing and is currently finishing work on a manuscript, The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry.

Hank Lazer has published fifteen books of poetry, most recently Portions (Lavender Ink), The New Spirit (Singing Horse), Elegies & Vacations (Salt), and Days (Lavender Ink). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. For the past four years, he has been working on a handwritten shape-writing project called the Notebooks (of Being & Time). Lazer is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and the Executive Director of the Creative Campus initiative at the University of Alabama.

Robert Mittenthal is author of Value Unmapped (Nomados), Martyr Economy, Ready Terms (Tsunami Editions), and the forthcoming Wax World (Chax). Irrational Dude, a chapbook of collaborative work with Nico Vassilakis, was published last year by tir aux pigeons. Mittenthal was instrumental in creating and curating the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle. For Mittenthal’s blog, see http://rmutts.blogspot.com.

A native of Southern California, Lou Rowan began his writing career in New York City, during the heyday of experimentation circulating through St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. He currently lives and writes in Seattle, where he edits Golden Handcuffs Review. His two recent books are the novel My Last Days (Chiasmus) and a story-collection Sweet Potatoes (Ahadada Books).

Zhang Er, born in Beijing, is the author of four collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Yellow Walls: A String of Doors. She has six chapbooks of her work translated into English, among them, Carved Water (Tinfish) and Sight Progress (Pleasure Boat Studio). Her selected poems occur within two bilingual collections, So Translating Rivers and Cities (Zephyr) and Verses on Bird (Zephyr). She co-edited the bilingual volume Another Kind of Nation: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman). She teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

About Splabman

Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
This entry was posted in Blog and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.