Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Poem Walk

Furniture Press Books and twentythreebooks will present the 6th Annual Cruellest Month Poetry & Performance Festival every Monday night in April at the Towson Library in Baltimore County. To kick off the affair, we’re offering a walking tour of poetry in the downtown Towson area called Poem Walk: A Living Text.

We are collecting poems about place, environment, locale. Since submissions will be coming from numerous backdrops, we hope that the walk will reflect the thread that links small communities and big cities: the necessity for arts sustainability.

After we receive submissions, we will print them and laminate the pages. Then, we’ll post them in public spaces throughout Towson for all to see. A map with detailed poem locations will also be available in local businesses and storefronts, and it is our hope that the Towson Chamber of Commerce and local papers will promote and highlight the walk.

We are also working with Towson University to create a walking tour on its campus. Its students and faculty have been a vital component to the life and productivity of our literary community since our beginnings, and our partnership reflects the verve of ongoing activity.

Submissions guidelines:

1.We accept all genres of poetry, as long as it reflects the theme of space, environment, locale. Please limit all submissions to one page. Please send poems electronically to furniture.press.books@gmail.com with the following subject heading: Poem Walk Submission / [your name] / [title of poem]. We will not be able to accept all submissions since we are limited of time and space.

2. Along with your submission, please add your name, a short bio and a short statement about your relationship to a specific place (the place of the poem) and how you envision the arts as a sustainable and necessary part of your community.

3.  Deadline: March 4, 2011.

The Poem Walk will remain in the public sphere from March till April to promote the 6th Annual Cruellest Month Poetry & Performance Festival. If you can contribute time and energy to this project, please feel free to contact me (Christophe Casamassima) at the email listed above. This might entail a day of reading submissions, laminating pages, walking around Towson and posting poems, laying out the map, etc. If you have ideas about how to promote this project, and would like to write a review and/or make it public, again, please write me.

Christophe Casamassima & Douglas Mowbray

Thursday, January 20, 2011

April Poetry Reading Lineup at the Towson Library

The 6th Annual Cruellest Month Reading Festival
April 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2011 / 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Towson Library / 320 York Rd, Towson, MD 21204

The Towson ARTS Collective, in partnership with the Towson Library, kick off National Poetry Month with a FREE reading and performance series celebrating the diverse literary talents of Baltimore’s best writers and performers. Each evening is hosted by a local arts organization, each reflecting the promise of creative and collaborative literacy in and around our community. Featured poets will read from their books, and performers will dramatize the poetic forms via song, dance, and theatre. An open mic for our audience members will follow. Light refreshments will also be served, and you will have a chance to speak with the performers and buy their books.

April 4
Do you suffer from disillusionment and alienation? Do reenact all of your interactions to try to discern why they went so badly? Do you always seem to be woefully overdressed or underdressed? Then this show is for you! Barbara DeCesare hosts TAL’s Cruelest Month for April 4, showcasing the awkward talents of: Hiram Larew! Michael Gushue! and Plato Hieronimous! With surprise plays requiring audience participation!

April 11
BrickHouse Books, owned/operated by Baltimore native Clarinda Harriss, presents two guests: Maryland attorney and poet Doritt Carroll, whose recent poetry collection, In Caves, was released in 2010; and poet, scientist, and scholar Bill Rivera, whose poetry collection, Buried in the Mind’s Back Yard, will be out in 2011.

April 18
Join Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! for an evening of Mobtown-infused poetry featuring readings from E. Doyle-Gillespie, S.J. Ferrandi, Gavin Heck, Ian Hochberg, Sarah Jane Miller, Fernando Quijano III and more. Smile, Hon editor, publisher, and contributing writer William P. Tandy will host.

April 25
Join the Maryland Writers’ Association (MWA) for a reading and book launch party. A baker’s dozen of poets will share their work from Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems, a poetry anthology published by the MWA in celebration of National Poetry Month featuring 50 Maryland poets.