Small Press Focus: Switchback Books

A Reading & Workshop with the ladies of Switchback
Saturday, May 30
12-4pm Workshop
7pm Reading

Switchback Books is a feminist press publishing poetry by women. Founded in 2006 by a group of students at Columbia College Chicago, Switchback Books publishes two books a year, one of which is the winner of the Gatewood Prize for a first book of poetry by a woman aged 18 through 39.

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Sense & Nonsense: A Poetry Workshop
with Becca Klaver Saturday, May 30, 12-4pm
$40 / $35m - includes the workshop AND a ticket to the 7pm Reading

Through a variety of sensory and nonsensical experiments, in this workshop we will explore our relationships to each of the traditional five senses (especially those we take for granted), consider the additional senses that poets rely on (sixth, seventh, seventeenth), examine synesthesia and other sense-related poetic topics, and indulge in nonsense. Experiments may or may not include flâneuring, blindfolds, taste/smell/touch-tests, and speaking in tongues, or in Stein. Participants will be asked to bring a few simple supplies to aid in the experiments, and will use the material generated to compose one or more poems or short texts by the end of the workshop.

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SwitchBack Books Reading
Featuring Becca Klaver,Brandi Homan & Kathleen Rooney, 7pm



Becca Klaver was born and raised in Milwaukee, attended the University of Southern California (BA) and Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and currently lives in Chicago, where she works and teaches at Columbia. With Brandi Homan and Hanna Andrews, she co-edits the feminist poetry press Switchback Books. Recent work can be found online in No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, and Coconut. Her chapbook, Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape, is available from the greying ghost press.



Brandi Homan is the author of Hard Reds (Shearsman Books, 2008). Her chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is available from dancing girl press. She earned her MFA at Columbia College Chicago and is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books.



Kathleen Rooney was born in Beckley, West Virginia and raised in the Midwest. Along with Abby Beckel, she is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. She is the author of Reading with Oprah: the Book Club That Changed AmericaThat Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008), a poetry collaboration with Elisa Gabbert, Oneiromance (an epithalamion), which won the the 2007 Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books, and Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (University of Arkansas Press, 2009), an occupational memoir. (University of Arkansas, 2005.

To register for the Workshop call 414-263-5001.
Tickets for the reading are $8 if you are not a workshop participant.

http://www.woodlandpattern.org/

Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust Street
Milwaukee, WI 53212
phone 414.263.5001

Elizabeth Willis Workshop & Reading! Saturday May 9th

What's Your Local? with Elizabeth Willis 11-1pm

This workshop will combine workshop and discussion. We will begin by talking about a few poems by Lorine Niedecker, paying particular attention to their sound, their culture, their environment, their combination of world history and the local 'now.' We will look at how these poems travel and what they can reveal in and about the present. These poems will serve in part as a guide to finding our own ways into language, taking into account our biological and political environment, individual experience, overheard language, and other found elements. How can a poem represent—or point you toward—the depth and scope of what you know and experience? What is your sound—and what makes it specifically your own? What belongs to you—and to what do you belong? We'll all write poems and discuss them as a group.

Elizabeth Willis' most recent books of poetry are Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006) and Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003). The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995) was selected for the National Poetry Series. Recently she edited a collection of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008). She grew up in Eau Claire, WI and now lives in Massachusetts. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

$25 gets you the workshop AND a ticket to the 7pm reading

To register call (414) 263-5001.

For an extended bio and poems visit: http://woodlandpattern.org/poem/elizabeth_willis01.shtml