The first BathHouse reading will take place Wednesday, September 29, at 6:30 p.m. in the Sponberg Theater at Quirk Hall. This reading will feature EMU’s Creative Writing faculty members: Christine Hume, Carla Harryman, and Rob Halpern. This event is free and open to the public.
Rob Halpern has authored several books of poetry, including Rumored Place (Krupskaya), Weak Link (Slack Buddha) and Disaster Suits (Palm Press). His new work, Music for Porn, is forthcoming next year from Nightboat Books. With Taylor Brady, he co-authored the book length poem, “Snow Sensitive Skin” (Atticus/Finch) that will soon be reissued by Displaced Press. Halpern’s work addresses the confusion of current geo-political conflicts, making the fatal abstractions of crisis audible — finance, militarization, war. The short lyric poems that comprise Disaster Suites, for instance, register the rhythms and desires of everyday life as they converge with devastating events from Katrina to Iraq. Halpern is also an essayist and a translator. His essay on Baudelaire’s prose poems recently appeared in Modernist Cultures. The essay, “Realism and Utopia: Writing, Sex and Politics in New Narrative” will appear in the next issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory. He’s co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with poet Kathleen Fraser and translating the early essays of Georges Perec. Halpern received his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2006). He is Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program.
Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, and playwright, known for genre-disrupting poetry, performance and prose. She has published 13 single-authored works, including Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press), Open Box (Belladonna), Baby (Zephyr Press) and Gardener of Stars (Atelos). The Wide Road, a multi-genre collaboration with poet Lyn Hejinian, is forthcoming from Belladonna. She is co-editor of Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker. She is special issue editor of “Non/Narrative” forthcoming from the Journal of Narrative Theory. Her recent articles include: “Something Nation: Radical Spaces of Performance in Linton Kwesi Johnson and Cris Cheek” (Diasporic Avant-Gardes, Palgrave/MacMillan). Her poets’ theater and interdisciplinary performance works have been performed nationally and internationally. A frequent collaborator, she is co-contributor to the multi-authored experiment in autobiography, The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of language writing, art, politics and culture of the San Francisco Bay area between 1975-1980. Harryman serves on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.
Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Shot (Counterpath), and a chapbook with CD, called Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse). She is coordinator of the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University, where she hosts Poetry Radio, an Internet radio show and podcast featuring contemporary and historic sound art, performance art, sound poetry, audio narratives, collaborations between writers and musicians, as well as student work.
Find out more about the entire BathHouse series at:
http://www.emich.edu/english/creative-writing/readingseries.php