Angus McLinn Will Read His Award-Winning Story "Baby Teeth" In Group Reading at Cornelia Street Cafe

Angus McLinn (Creative Writing MFA candidate) will be giving a public reading of his short story "Baby Teeth," which won first prize in the "Quarter Life Crisis" contest held by Three Rooms Press and will be featured in that press's forthcoming book Songs of My Selfie: An Anthology of Millennial Stories (April, 2016).

The reading will be at the Prose Poetry Party 3 at Cornelia Street Cafe (29 Cornelia Street, Manhattan) on Friday, December 4th.

LIU Brooklyn Campus Goes Tobacco-Free

LIU is committed to providing its students, employees, and visitors with a safe and healthy environment as well as aggressively promoting the values of reason and ethics at the core of higher education. In light of these commitments and the findings of the U.S. Surgeon General that tobacco use and exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke are significant health hazards, LIU Brooklyn, after many months of discussion and outreach, has established the following tobacco-free policy, effective January 1, 2016.

The use of any form of tobacco is prohibited anywhere on the property of the LIU Brooklyn campus, including all buildings, private offices, open park areas and green space, University vehicles, playing fields, dormitories, locker rooms, loading docks, storage areas, terraces and garages. This policy covers the use of all tobacco products including, but not limited to, cigarette and cigar smoking, chewing and smokeless tobacco, e-cigarettes, and powdered tobacco. Further, all tobacco promotions, advertising, marketing, sponsorship of events or individuals and distribution are prohibited from campus. This policy applies to anyone who uses the LIU Brooklyn campus, including employees, students, and visitors.

For those who would like to participate in on-campus activities to promote a smoke-free campus, please contact Carole Griffiths (cgriff@liu.edu) or Jolanta Kruszelnicka (Jolanta.Kruszelnicka@liu.edu).

Creative Writing MFA Reading Series: December Reading at KGB Bar

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Patrick Horrigan: Messages for Gary

LIU Brooklyn's Performing Arts Department Theatre Program presents MESSAGES FOR GARY, by Patrick E. Horrigan (English Department, LIU Brooklyn),

directed by Iris Rose.

This absorbing one-act play documents the true-life story of a young political activist and writer named Gary Lucek.  For unknown reasons, from 1987 until 1991 Gary saved all of his incoming answering machine tapes. Horrigan transcribed those tapes word for word (15 tapes in total, amounting to 18 hours of messages), and shaped them into this one-act play, which tells the story of Gary's life in silhouette. Through the ordinary voices of everyday people, the play chronicles the dawning of AIDS activism, the changing tides of local and national politics, as well as the often tangled lives of Gary's family, friends, lovers, and acquaintances. MESSAGES FOR GARY is both an intimate portrait of a unique individual and a devastating commentary on the struggle to find humanity in an increasingly alienated world. More than just a time capsule of the late 80s and early 90s, MESSAGES FOR GARY is a meditation on technology and its impact on the way we talk, listen, and care for each other.

MESSAGES FOR GARY was a commercial and critical hit when it was first produced as part of the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival.  This new production, with a wonderful cast of LIU-Brooklyn student actors, is the first revival in over 16 years.

Student actors include Chris Burgess, Morgan Hotchkiss, Winchelle Jean-Pierre, Kyle Petrshin, Samantha Samant, Alexander Simon, Aidan Wallace, and Andrew Williams.

November 17-21, 2015 @ 7PM.
The Barbara and Melvin Pasternack Little Theatre (Humanities Building, Room H608).

Tickets are $5 each.

Email Valerie Cardinal at vscardinal@gmail.com to reserve seats.

Barbara Henning: Poems

Four poems from Twelve Green Rooms by Barbara Henning (English) have been republished online at Water, Water Everywhere, a blog of poems, short prose & art. 

Book Party & Reading for Daniel Owen & Tony Iantosca

We are happy to report that two recent alumni from the English Department's Creative Writing MFA program have new poetry collections available from United Artists Books (Editor, Lewis Warsh).

United Artists and Shoestring Press, a fine art print shop and art space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, will be hosting a book party and reading for Toot Sweet by Daniel Owen and Shut Up, Leaves by Tony Iantosca.

When:

Saturday, November 21, 2015, at 7 PM.

Where:

Shoestring Press

663 Classon Ave.

Brooklyn, NY

Directions:

2/3/4/5 to Franklin (on Eastern Parkway)

C or S to Franklin (on Fulton)

A to Nostrand

G to Classon.

About the books....

Toot Sweet

Daniel Owen

Cover by Pareesa Pourian

ISBN 0-935992-41-3

58p.   $15.00

“Like its punning title, Dan Owen’s agile first collection is playful but with a subtext of urgency. “We ask for nothing less than new / means of new streets,” he writes, but the request goes unanswered—which is what happens when poems end but whatever prompted them persists. Here, the prompts range from the cannibalism of cockroaches to the terrifying specter of ‘the Capital skull,’ from an image of ‘40 active war heads” to an intuition of existing in “a prison of safety.’ The cumulative effect is one of a quiet, persistent claim to some kind of agency against the odds. Even the puns and wordplay in Toot Sweet make for small acts of resistance, not in lieu of but in line with action in the world (‘things happen so we / take to the bridge’)—for puns also have the power to divert traffic from its prescribed course. Owen has developed a disabused but undeterred lyric mode, fit to metabolize ‘futurity’s bitty / beads of fat.’”  Anna Moschovakis

“Toot Sweet, Daniel Owen’s exquisitely scaled long poem full of jaunts and song and a wry foregrounding of diction, strums delight. And values bewilderment. And acknowledges, without giving into, the power of despair. Its line--the sense of where you are in a poem--goes horizontal when you think you’ve caught its rhythm, never settles, is unmachine-like and possessed by touch. This makes for a pleasure-giving, complex, and quite beautiful read, open to anyone who looks for such qualities in this world.”  Anselm Berrigan

Shut Up, Leaves

Tony Iantosca

Cover by Zachary Cummings

ISBN 0-935992-42-1

96p.  $15.00

“Tony Iantosca's sentences sharpen all the senses at once; the heard world is as present as the seen and touched. "I’m tapping my foot to nothing much," but actually, it's the profound rhythm of elegy disguised as mundane, everyday life: street, couch, phone, heart. Something or someone is missing, it could be a dog, it could be the poet. There are rumors of Ted Greenwald and Joseph Ceravolo in these poems, amidst their self-deprecating vernacular, calling to mind William Carlos Williams when Spring and All was green. ‘Once poetry / was important I guess or at least / peripherally relevant to something / everyone else was doing.’ This is unfashionable and excellent poetry. Consider reading it to a lover so as to elicit a reciprocal feeling, ‘or whatever.’ It will work.” Matvei Yankelevich

“The poet-voyeur in Shut Up, Leaves walks his reader into a world of senseless losses and discrepancies. We go along, each poem a door to a new labyrinth of paradoxical situations, and we believe we are really heading somewhere. Iantosca’s poems are compelling in their imaginative engagement with language and emotion, and they make us rethink the way we see and live in the world. This is a necessary book.” Barbara Henning

Both books are available from the following:

Small Press Distribution, spdbooks.org

United Artists Books, www.unitedartistsbooks.com.

Lewis Warsh: Moby Dick Marathon Reading

Lewis Warsh (English) will be one of the readers at this year's Moby Dick Marathon NYC, which is being co-sponsored by the Whitney Museum.

The reading begins on Friday, November 13, 2015 @ 11AM; and ends sometime the next day.

Jonathan Haynes: New Article

We are happy to congratulate Professor Jonathan Haynes (English) on the publication of his chapter “La fondazione di Nollywood: ‘Living in Bondage’.” (Trans. Alessandro Jedlowski) in the book Lagos Calling: Nollywood e la reinvenzione del cinema in Africa (Eds. Alessandro Jedlowski and Giovanna Santanero; Ariccia, Italy: Arachne, 2015. 25-41.)

Core Faculty & Visiting Writers, Creative Writing MFA Program

CORE FACULTY

Photo: David Gardiner

Lewis Warsh is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), One Foot Out The Door: Collected Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), A Place In The Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010), and Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 (Granary Books, 2008).  He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and The Fund for Poetry. His work has been widely anthologized, including The Best American Poetry Anthology (1997, 2002, 2003). He is co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology, editor and publisher of United Artists Books, and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at LIU Brooklyn.

Photo: Mookie Saperstein

Professor Emerita Barbara Henning is the author of three novels and eleven collections of poetry. Her most recent publications are A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015); A Swift Passage (Quale Press, 2013); Cities & Memory (Chax Press, 2010); a novel, Thirty Miles to Rosebud (BlazeVox, 2009); and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists, 2007). She is the editor of The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins and a collection of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen. She is a board member of the Belladonna Collaborative, editor of Long News: A Journal of Writing (1991-96) and a long-time yoga practitioner, having lived and studied in Mysore, India; she brings this knowledge and discipline to her writing and teaching for Naropa University (2006-14) and for the MFA program at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

Graduate Advisor & Coordinator of Graduate Studies in English, Jake Matkov writes poetry and teaches undergraduate English courses. A recipient of a 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowship and a 2015-16 Queer / Art / Mentorship literary fellowship, his poems have been published in glitterMOB magazine, Lambda Literary poetry spotlight, fields magazine, voicemail poems, and others. Currently, he is working on a manuscript of poems examining trauma and memory, as well as a long poem exploring shame, silence, disease, queerness, and the human body.

FORMER CORE FACULTY

Jessica Hagedorn (Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing, 2008-2016)
John High
Erica Hunt (Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing, 2016-2019)

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