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Drowning Lessons: stories by Peter Selgin
Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for 2008
The University of Georgia Press, October 15, 2008
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"There is nothing but water in the holy pools. I know, I have been swimming in them."--Kabir
-- HUDSON VALLEY WRITER'S CENTER
-- CORNELIA STREET CAFE
-- FORTHCOMING FROM DZANC BOOKS, April 2009
-- BY CUNNING & CRAFT, a Guide for Fiction Writers
-- Forthcoming: THE SECRET LIFE OF FICTION
Join me in celebrating the publication of my first book of stories, Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2008 Flannery O'Connor Award.
Please mark the dates! I hope to see you!
"Peter Selgin's writing creates a current that will carry readers farther than they would ever have expected, and leave them on a new shore."--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
"Thank goodness for Peter Selgin, who shares with us the mysteries of the human
heart in this electric, revealing collection."--Benjamin Percy, author of Refresh,Refresh
"A stellar collection deserving recognition. High emotional intelligence, empathy, courage, and intellectual curiosity fuel this collection, giving it a rare narrative fire beyond the obvious and admirable excellence of craft."--Melissa Pritchard, author of Late Bloomer
HUDSON VALLEY WRITER'S CENTER
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Reading with Gary Gildner, author of Blue Like the Heavens, New & Selected Poems
Hudson Valley Writer's Center
300 Riverside Drive, Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591
at the Philipse Manor Train Station
Information at: http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001FbOzg7FTO-yHyH6ctnd-uvO62aBTW_Ytpk3QE2HsgqxE5kolkuq_2mTGeM4CU6b9QDnTtENyGDW14-TYRt3zxw3qAhFZU0abZ5aAvcEV1PvP-0Nljhq7hg==
Phone: 814-332-5953
Sunday, October 12, 4:30 p.m.
CORNELIA STREET CAFE
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Reading with Dustin Beall Smith,author of Key Grip, a Memoir of Endless
Consequences
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street, NYC
For information: visit
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001FbOzg7FTO-wCesi8e5jy65kJ_nIU4VT5DsEf39MGBMEcgIf2DOEiRSNElzoSScm32AxUWxzgdLmkRNzJOKhulVCfYrCQpwXfjqAuAX_5GmJ5u3hYe5lq_GR8imtxFlqB
phone: (212) 989-9319
Sunday, October 19, 6:00 p.m.
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE DROWNING LESSONS
FORTHCOMING FROM DZANC BOOKS, April 2009
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Life Goes to the Movies, a novel
"At the center of Life Goes to the Movies is Dwaine Fitzgibbon, a young filmmaker with a wild imagination and inexhaustible ambition. For Dwaine, every experience is potential material for the great film he's going to make, and everyone he meets becomes a part of his supporting cast. Swept up into the performance that is Dwaine's life, the novel's narrator, Nigel DePoli, describes their fraught friendship as it intensifies and evolves through the years. It's a riveting story, artfully constructed and told with wit, precision, and sensitivity."--Joanna Scott, author of Everybody Loves Somebody--Finalist, James Jones First Novel Fellowship --Finalist, AWP Award for the Novel; Forthcoming from Dzanc Books
BY CUNNING & CRAFT, a Guide for Fiction Writers
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"There is craft and there is cunning. There is the struggle to get published at all. But there is also the chance that you will do something extraordinary. Peter Selgin illustrates the tricks, both basic and sophisticated. But greatness is what he's really interested in. He thrusts the readers into the company of those who wrote magnificently. Salinger is quoted, Hemingway, Thomas Mann, E.M. Forster, John Gardner. 'This book is for serious writers of all levels,' he writes in the beginning, and he's talking about intentions. If you mean to shoot for the stars, then this book is for you."--Benjamin Cheever, author of The Good Nanny
"A masterpiece of writing about writing. If, like Scheherazade, you had to spin out a story under threat of death, this is the how-to book to read. It's filled with
thoughtful, nuanced advice from a teacher/writer who actually writes--and writes beautifully and with great humor. The list of rejected stories is worth the price of the whole book."--Nora Gallagher, author of Changing Light
TO PURCHASE BY CUNNING & CRAFT CLICK HERE
Forthcoming: THE SECRET LIFE OF FICTION
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The Secret Life of Fiction: 199 Meditations on Works-in-Progress, is a book meant not only for aspiring and accomplished writers of fiction, but for anyone with an interest in how great fiction gets (and doesn't get) written. Like Francine Prose's enormously successful Reading Like a Writer, it offers an entertainingly erudite glimpse into the fiction writer's processes and pitfalls. But while that work examines only masterpieces (as does James Wood's How Fiction Works), The Secret Life of Fiction provides examples both exemplary and cautionary from works of novices and masters. It shows readers not only how fiction "works," but how and why it often fails to work.
Forthcoming from Writer's Digest Books
(date TBA)
June, 2009 Writing Workshop is Vitorchiano, Italy
FOR OTHER EVENTS & WORKSHOPS CLICK HERE
Contact Information
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email:
peter@peterselgin.com
web:
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001FbOzg7FTO-x_Ya15eRbG3O6_MIfgxNLTa0TCn74_FXyUg9VjpdPtOqnJ1BciqNG170NHYk_Aq77n7Vs6wP1Aee4GIKQG5qrilOHcOcWvnrL0ovxXZvy5Gw
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 Sous Rature
Cara Benson
 A VERSAL CALL Versal wants your poetry, prose, and art for its seventh issue due outin May, 2009. Internationally acclaimed literary annual published in Amsterdam; perfect bound, 100 pages of the urgent, involved, & unexpected. See website for guidelines and to submit: http://versal.wordsinhere.com/. We only accept submissions through our(easy-to-use) online submission manager. Inquiries (only) can bedirected to: versal@wordsinhere.com. Deadline: January 15, 2009. Many thanks, Megan M. Garr
Editor, Versal
 Writers:Broadsided invites you to submit poetry and prose in response to the art posted on our website ( http://www.broadsidedpress.org/) and attached to this email. Deadline: October 15, 2008. The selected writing will be published at http://www.broadsidedpress.org/ on November 1, 2008. Guidelines: Responses need not be literal—you may take off in any tangent the work suggests. However, the art and writing must, together, work to create a greater piece. Poems must be 30 lines or shorter; prose pieces under 300 words. We accept submissions only in the BODY of emails (no attachments) sent to " mailto:broadsided@gmail.com" -- for complete guidelines and to see examples of past Switcheroos, visit www.broadsidedpress.org/guides.shtmlWhy is it called The Switcheroo? Let us explain: At Broadsided, a virtual, on-the-streets press that harnesses the tradition of the broadside, we have a group of artists who create visual responses to writing the editors have selected for publication. Each month, we post on our website an original visual/literary collaboration that anyone can download, print, and post -- a gang of Vectors around the country print and post the broadsides in local bus stops, coffee shops, offices, etc. In The Switcheroo, we turn the tables, asking a curator to select a piece of visual art and then soliciting written responses from writers. This time, artist Elizabeth Terhune has chosen a watercolor by artist Helen Beckman Kaplan entitled "Empire." Helen Beckman Kaplan is a painter from Brooklyn who was educated at Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art, Indiana University and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been a resident at Yaddo and Millay Colony, and has exhibited her work in New York at AC Project Room and Edward Thorp Gallery. Of "Empire," Elizabeth Terhune has this to say: Helen Beckman Kaplan's watercolor painting, "Empire," of a rather strange bird in an unusual—if not sad—landscape was selected for the Switcheroo because it repeatedly drew my attention even after many viewings. It kept pulling at me. The bird embodies complex emotions. It is a quizzical creature in a landscape that appears a bit of a shambles, part balustrade, part fog, part rock face. There is an after-the-flood quality that is offset by the quirkiness of the piece. It is simultaneously peaceful while also being unsettling. The overwhelming feeling is one of remoteness, and it is within this remoteness that I thought a poem might be found. I like what can't be answered about this image. There is a Rorschach quality of swirling forms within the atmosphere that the bird contemplates. "Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell." I came across that line from one of Emily Dickinson's letters in Richard B. Sewall's wonderful biography of Emily Dickinson. It made me think of this watercolor and then that other American literary treasure, Edgar Allan Poe and his . . . raven. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: OCTOBER 15, 2008We look forward to reading the responses that come in -- please feel free to post, forward, and pass along this announcement by any means you see fit. Sincerely, The Editors
www.broadsidedpress.org
GRANDPA'S WINE Poems by Gil Fagiani POETS WEAR PRADA SEPTEMBER 15, 2008 ISBN 978-0-9817678-2-6
(soft cover/17 pp.)
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
The inspiration for Fagiani’s latest collection, Grandpa’s Wine, is the immigrant generation of his own family. Through stories, myths, and personal observations, he explores the turmoil facing immigrants everywhere, as they adjust to leaving one homeland, in search of new opportunities in another.
Grandpa’s Wine is written where people make a life among the ruins of a shattered world. Feelings and memories take the place of an old coherence, now lost and never to be replaced. Gil Fagiani’s poems inhabit this world’s poignancy, searching its sorrows with unimpeachable candor and a spare language that perfectly suits its straightforward tastes and its undervalued satisfactions.
—Robert Viscusi, author of Astoria: A Novel
Gil Fagiani’s poems celebrate the older generation of Italian immigrants as they collide with America, as they simultaneously hold to old ways and forge new identities. His lean lines describe without judgment, like my grandmother tasting her sister-in-law's rosemary tomato sauce every Sunday, “good, good, good enough,” she would purr. This collection hums with love, but it is a love born of mastery of the ingredients, and the application of great discipline and control.
—Angelo Verga, author of 33 New York City Poems
* * * September 21, 2008, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. in Hemsptead, NY: The 16th Annual Italian Experience
~Presents~ The 7th Annual
Poets' and Writers'PIAZZI
A Celebration in Contemporary Italian Culture and the Literary Word ~With Featured Poets & Writers~ Louisa Calio,
Rosemary Cappello,
Dr. Rosetta D’Angelo,
GIL FAGIANI,
Emily Ferrara,
Diana Festa,
Venera Fazio,
Daniela Gioseffi,
Barbara F. Hoffman,
Maria Lisella,
Rob Marchesani,
Frank Messina,
Jim Pignetti,
Frank Polizzi,
Dr. Anthony J. Tamburri
@ The Emily and Jerry Spiegel Theater Hofstra's South Campus (Hempstead Turnpike) Hempstead,NY 11549 FREE! Join in a day of Italian music, cuisine, dance, foklore, art, theatre, and culture. Sponsored by The Association of Italian American Educators with Hofstra's Italian Experience We would like to thank http://www.mythopoetry.com/ for their support! Info: 516-463-5042 Email: Louisa Caliohttp://www.aiae.net/* * *  Photo Credit: Maria LisellaGil Fagiani’s poetry collection, Rooks is set at Pennsylvania Military College in the 1960s (Rain Mountain Press, 2007); his chapbook, Crossing 116th Street: A Blanquito in El Barrio was published by Skidrow Penthouse in 2004. He has translated poetry written from Italian, Abruzzese dialect, and Spanish into English. He co-hosts the monthly literary reading of the Italian American Writers’ Association at the Cornelia Street Café, and is Associate Editor of Feile-Festa: A Literary Arts Journal. Fagiani is a social worker by profession, and directs a residential treatment program for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts in Downtown Brooklyn. * * * POETS WEAR PRADA C/O Roxanne Hoffman 533 Bloomfield Street - 2nd Floor Hoboken, NJ 07030 http://poetswearpradanj.home.att.net/http://poetswearprada.blogspot.com/
POETS WEAR PRADA is a small press based in Hoboken, New Jersey devoted to introducing new authors through limited edition, high- quality chaplets, primarily of poetry.
New press, great authors, a publisher who is one miracle short of sainthood.
-Angelo Verga, Poetry Curator of The Cornelia Street Cafe
Poets Wear Prada is a poetry publishing house with excellent poets and affordable books with beautiful covers. Have you had your poetry today? -Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers
Stylistically, these beautifully designed and produced chaplets bear their own distinctive signature.
George Spencer is establishing a poetry slam in Quito, Ecuador. The first official open to the public slam is the 30th of September 2008. The venue is Cafelibro which is 5 blocks from 5 universities which have 10,000 students. If you are in the neighborhood or travelling in the vicinity please come by and participate! Contact George by email. George Spencer está estableciendo un golpe de la poesía en Quito, Ecuador. El primer golpe, abierto al público, es el trigésimo del septiembre de 2008. El golpe ocurrirá en Cafelibro que es 5 bloques a partir de 5 universidades que tengan 10.000 estudiantes. ¡Si usted vive en el área o está viajando en la vecindad por favor viene y participa! Comunique con George por el email.
 RUTHERFORDRed Wheelbarrow Poets ANTHOLOGY ISBN: 978-1-4357-5951-0 Trade Paperback $18.50 E-Book $12.50 200 pp.
There's a marvelous revival of poetry underway in Rutherford, NJ, home of the influential American poet William Carlos Williams. A Symposium on WIlliams has led to a poetry cooperative, several websites, two ongoing workshops, and a monthly reading. The RUTHERFORD RED WHEELBARROW POETS ANTHOLOGY is the living proof of the great vortex of poetic energy that has been created. The book features an unpublished poem by WIlliams and also poets like JOHN BARRALE, CELINE BEAULIEU, SONDRA SINGER BEAULIEU, GEORGE DE GREGORIO, MARK FOGARTY, JIM KLEIN, LOREN KLEINMAN, ZORIDA MOHAMMAD, DEBORAH SCHANTZ, CLAUDIA SEREA and many more!
Congratulations to BRANT LYON and JOHN J. TRAUSE whose works are included in this most excellent anthology!
 THE SALVADOR-DALI-LAMA EXPRESSpoems by Mark Terrill Main Street Rag, November 2008 softcover, 40pp. $10.00 A new 40-page chapbook of Mark Terrill's poems, The Salvador-Dalai-Lama Express, is tentatively scheduled for publication on November 17, 2008. The publisher, Main Street Rag, is offering an advance order discount through November 10th. Until that date, copies of the chapbook can be ordered for $7.00 instead of the regular $10.00 cover price. To make an advance order, go to Main Street Rag’s Coming Soon Page and place your order via PayPal, which is the preferred method of payment. You'll find separate links for domestic & overseas orders. The advance discount price applies to online sales ONLY. Both the release date and the size of the press run will be determined in part by the amount of advance sales, so your orders are important, as well as a good way to save some money. You'll also be supporting that endangered species known as the "small press." Here’s an excerpt from The Salvador-Dalai-Lama Express:
Ultramarine
Prosperous in our ignorance,
ignorant in our
prosperity,
the laws of nature
rain down upon us
in our stylish
waxed cotton
designer raincoats.
The hottest summer on record
and we're cooling our drinks
with chunks of ice
broken off from the
polar ice cap as it floats by
the kitchen window.
Other poems in The Salvador-Dalai-Lama Express have appeared or are forthcoming in Babylon Burning: 9/11 Five Years On, Blades, Blue Book, Bordercrossing Berlin, The Café Review, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Diagram, Eclipse, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Little Horse’s Magazine, Louis Liard Magazine, Mineshaft, New Delta Review, Nth Position, Origin, Poesia, Poetry Salzburg Review, Presa, Red Mountain Review, Salamander, Santa Clara Review, Saranac Review, Shearsman, Spillway, Sulphur River Literary Review, Thunder Sandwich, Upstairs at Duroc, Vox, Vulcan and Water~Stone Review.
 Starving Swallowsby
Radomir Vojtech Luza
Publish America, June 2008
ISBN: 1605637254
ISBN-13: 9781605637259 Trade Paperback
80pp.
Retail $16.95 ($14.95 + $3.50 S&H within USA at publisher's online bookstore)
Starving Swallows carries the spirit of a man locked in a mental hospital, not knowing when or if he will ever leave. It is blue, red and orange. It is pain and victory, humor and disdain. No tragedy. It was written usually at night on top of plastic garbage cans with only the dim corridor light seeing it through. It touches on twenty years of psychotropic medication and the highs and lows of its intake. But fool yourself not, Starving Swallows is a book dedicated to the one emotion that matters more than life itself: love. It eats breakfast with it, swallows lunch and harmonizes dinner. Starving Swallows is dedicated to love, old or new, borrowed or blue, and the mysterious miracle it is.
Radomir Vojtech Luza is a poet/writer/actor/comedian/sometimes lead singer who has had over one hundred poems published in over thirty-five literary journals. Radomir has been featured poet all over the country and has had twelve chapbooks published. He has organized and hoseted six or seven poetry series in north New Jersey, New York City and Los Angelos, and published and edited the literary journals Voices in the Library and California East. Radomir, who has a BA in English from Tudane University in New Orleans, has poetry collection coming out in 2009 from Poets Wear Prada Press, outside New York City in Hoboken, New Jersey. Publish America
PRESS RELEASE September 1, 2008  LOVE AFTER 70 Heather Tosteson, Nancy Pelletier, and Megan Krivchenia, Editors Wising Up Press ISBN 978-0-9796552-4-1 289 pps. List Price: $16.00 Wising Up Press announces release of a new anthology, Love After 70. It includes the work of Hoboken, New Jersey writer Roxanne Hoffman* and is edited by Heather Tosteson, Nancy Pelletier, and Megan Krivchenia. Comprised of stories, memoirs and poetry by over fifty accomplished contemporary authors, many over seventy, the collection explores what love—in all its forms—is like after 70. The work is passionate, tender, sensual, grieving, and wise—a wonderful road map for those who haven't arrived yet and a wonderful tribute to those who have. The collection will be of interest to a broad audience Wising Up Press, located in Decatur, Georgia, is a new small press started by Universal Table, an organization whose purpose is to encourage and support our appreciation of diversity. Its first anthology, Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation (2007) focused on how people find meaning in illness and trauma. The second, Families: The Frontline of Pluralism (2008) explores the challenges and rewards of our everyday experience living up close and personal, willingly or not, with differences in genes, sensibility, abilities and disabilities, sexual orientation, race, religion, and culture. All three books are available on their website, www.universaltable.org/bookstore.html, and are also available through major internet booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Wising Up Press
UNIVERSAL TABLE, INC.
P.O. Box 2122
Decatur, GA 30031-21222
wisingup@universaltable.org
www.universaltable.org
404/276-6046 *CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Jill C. Alt ◊ Lois Barr ◊ William Borden ◊ Regina Murray Brault Patricia Brodie ◊ Anna Chance ◊ Joan Dobbie ◊ Juditha Dowd Marilynn Dunham ◊ Stephanie Feuer ◊ Bernice M. Fisher Maureen Tolman Flannery ◊ Emilie George ◊ Maralee Gerke Ann Goethe ◊ Myrna Goodman ◊ Martha Deborah Hall Carolyn Harris ◊ Grey Held ◊ Roxanne Hoffman Phyllis Langton ◊ Martin Lindauer ◊ Christina Lovin Marsha Mathews ◊ Janice H. Mikesell ◊ Lynn Ruth Miller Angela Conti Molgaard ◊ Mary O'Dell ◊ Carl Palmer Nancy Pelletier ◊ Julie Preis ◊ Joyce Richardson Phil Richardson ◊ Elisavietta Ritchie ◊ Frank Salvidio Cynthia Sample ◊ Wayne Scheer ◊ Ada Jill Schneider Alexandrina Sergio ◊ Lucille Gang Shulklapper Claudette Mork Sigg ◊ Ruth Silin ◊ Roger B. Smith Paul Sohar ◊ Anna Steegmann ◊ J.J.Steinfeld Dorothy Stone ◊ Patricia Sullivan ◊ Sylvie Terespolski Don Thackrey ◊ Sondra Zeidenstein
Blood Dazzler Poems by Patricia Smith Coffee House Press Trade Paperback Poems 978-1-56689-218-6 90 Pages $16.00 List Price Order from the Author: $16.00 + $2 S&H This book will arrive signed by the author.
In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category 5 storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched on television. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to the immeasurable losses. An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler serves not only as a memorial, but as a necessary step toward national healing. BLOOD DAZZLER Book Release Party
Friday, September 5, 2008
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY
Brooklyn Book Festival
Sunday, September 14, 2008
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Brooklyn Book Festival
Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza
Brooklyn, NY
Book release party with D. Nurske
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St. (one blk east of Broadway btwn Houston & Prince)
New York, NY
212.334.3324
Dodge Poetry Festival
Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 8:00am
THRU
Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 4:00pm
Waterloo Village
Stanhope, NJ
973.540.8442
From the soul-shattering drama of everyday life evident in news headlines to the liberating and uplifting power of poetry . . . Smith’s pieces are underscored by a reverence for the raw drama and passion of human existence.
—World Literature Today
Spiritual and gutsy, Patricia Smith's satirical poems lay New Orleans bare, with Katrina at the driving wheel..."Blood Dazzler" is a document of feelings whose tinges of the blues capture an urgent witnessing through the natural empathy embedded in praise, woe, and awe.
—Yusef Komunyakaa
With her radiant powers of empathy, her fiercely acute ear for the musical possibilities of American speech, and her undiluted rage, Patricia Smith makes in Katrina's wake a sorrowful, unflinching and glorious book.
—Mark Doty
...full of capricious soul and formal inventiveness....I consider this new book a major literary event.
—Terrance Hayes
http://www.coffeehousepress.org/blooddazzler.asp
Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology Edited by Jose (JoeGo) Gouveia K. Peddler Bridges Archer Books, August 2008 $16.00 List Price Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology combines poetry, essays and photography that challenge the stereotype of the ‘bad boy’ biker, and chronicle the rise of the biker poet and biker poetry. The contributors to this book include the late Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn, Diane Wakoski, and a host of writers from the motorcycle press, including Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum (Harley-Davidson Historian Emeritus), Susan Buck, and K. Peddlar Bridges. Featuring photos by noted motorcycle photographer, Michael Lichter ( Choppers, Heavy Metal Art)
 ARCHER BOOKS
Publisher of Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry
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