Literary Pittsburgh: Readings Galore This Weekend

The next few days are packed with great readings: I’m exhausted just thinking about it!

Saturday afternoon, August 29th, 1:30pm: Autumn House at the Pump House. Pittsburgh’s own Autumn House Press will host one novelist and one poet at the historic
Pump House in Homestead: There’s a nice review of John Hoerr’s novel Monogahela Dusk in the City Paper this week; Hoerr is actually a long-time labor journalist, and this is his first work of fiction. I’m a big fan of Robert Gibb’s poetry, especially his Homestead Trilogy. Gibb will read at the Pump House from a new Autumn House volume of his work, What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979-1993.

Saturday night, August 29th: East End avant-garde publisher Six Gallery Press is holding their periodic Showcase (this one is called Hot August Night) with 14 readers from the Pittsburgh poetry underground. Digging Pitt blogger, videographer extraordinaire, talented poet, and charismatic reader Jessica Fenlon (pictured) will read from her new book of poetry, Spiritual Side Effects. Guest author Kevin Finn will read from his new chapbook, Exit Wounds (Ohio: Amsterdam Press), Six Galllery poet Michael S. Begnal is visiting from North Carolina, and all will share the stage with many other local talents: Renee Alberts, Nikki Allen, Jerome Crooks, Davka, Che Elias, Bill Hughes, Jonathan Loucks, Alexi Morrissey, Scott Silsbe, Ed Steck, Billie Steigerwald, Matt Wellins, and Don Wentworth of Lilliput Review fame. Local rock stars Colin Baxter and Julie Sokolow will provide the musical entertainment. ModernFormations at 4919 Penn Avenue, $5 at the door, 8:00pm, BYOB.

Late-night on August 29th (hey, you could make it to all 3 of Saturday's readings if you wanted to): KINETIX! (formerly Poetry…Yes!) is a new late-night poetry series that happens once a month and runs from 11:00pm-1:00am in the theater lobby at The New Hazlett Theater on the Northside. Featured Pittsburgh poets are followed by an Open Mic. $5 door charge; doors open at 10:30pm. (N.b.: the last 54C bus leaves Allegheny Center at 1:12 AM.)

Sunday August 30th at 2:00pm: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (Main library in Oakland) holds its weekly Sunday Poetry and Reading Series, featuring Chuck Lanigan’s presentation of fiction and oral history: To Be of Use: Stories of Labor and Identity in Southwestern PA. Free.

Sunday night, August 30th: The fabulous Typewriter Girls Cabaret will feature the fabulous Gist Street hosts as readers: poet Nancy Krygowski and fictionist Sherrie Flick with her new novel, Reconsidering Happiness. Poet Sandra Beasley, musician Steve Pellegrino, burlesque act The Bridge City Bombshells, and much more will round out the show. Howler’s Café in Bloomfield. Doors at 7:00pm, show at 8:00pm, $5.00 cover. See more info here.

Tuesday evening, September 1st: Outrageous blogger Maddox will be in town signing his book of “fratire,” called The Alphabet of Manliness. 6:00pm at Borders Eastside on Centre Avenue near Highland (aka Penn Circle South).

Literary Pittsburgh--Get Your Readings Here

There's lots for the literary audience to love this month. The following are only SOME of what's out there in Steel City in the next few weeks:

The ever-popular Gist Street readings happen tonight in Uptown. Emily Mitchell (who teaches writing at nearby WVU) is the featured fiction reader, and Jeffrey McDaniel (who has published on Manic D Press and University of Pittsburgh Press) will read from his poetry. The Gist Street readings start at 8:00 but doors close when the place hits capacity--go early to ensure your seat! Door charge, $5.00, held at James Simon’s sculpture studio, 305 Gist Street. For more info and directions: giststreet.org

On the other side of town, at the lovely Kelly Strayhorn Theatre in East Liberty (5941 Penn Ave on Penn Circle), you can see spoken word and music with performers like Human Nature hosts, Yah Lioness and Gene Stovall, Human Nature house musician Hambone Jenkins, DJ Omar Abdul in the front lobby, and more. The event is called KST Live, costs $5.00 and starts at 7:00pm.



Tomorrow, Saturday February 7th, there's a great lineup at Most Wanted Fine Art Gallery at 5015 Penn Avenue. Calling themselves the Six Degree Reading, emerging poets Renée Alberts, Sophie Klahr, Holly Coleman, Michelle Stoner, Jerome Crooks, Nikki Allen, and Jason Kirin will read starting at 7:00pm, also for $5.00.

Mid-month, the New Yinzer's reading series, TNY Presents, features Gist Street host Sherrie Flick with fiction, Patti Emory with poetry, and indie rocker and dramatist, Julie Sokolow with fiction. February 18th at ModernFormations, 8:00pm, $5.00.

Pittsburgh's own poetry powerhouse, Autumn House Press will host two readings for their anthology, When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women edited by Andrea Hollander Budy. A book launch will be held at Chatham University on Tuesday, February 24 at 8:00 p.m. in the James Laughlin Music Hall (Welker Room). Featured readers will be Andrea Hollander Budy, Toi Derricotte, Sheryl St. Germain, and Judith Vollmer. Then on Friday, February 27 from noon to 2:00 p.m., there will be a "Reading & Conversation" for the book at the YWCA Greater Pittsburgh at 305 Wood Street, Downtown. There will be readings by Andrea Hollander Budy and two residential clients of the YWCA. Both Autumn House events are free.



Six Gallery Press is running a showcase reading of their authors later in the month, called The Big Dig. Saturday, February 28th at ModernFormations Gallery on Penn Avenue, join Renée Alberts, Jessica Fenlon, Dana Killmeyer, Jerome Crooks, Nikki Allen, Karen Lillis, Che Elias, Jonathan Loucks, Kristofer Collins, John Thomas Menesini, Scott McClanahan up from West Virginia (he was a show-stealer last time), Alexi Morrissey, Scott Silsbe, Bill Hughes, and the inimitable Ed Steck for a combination of poetry and fiction.

Also, Pittsburgh press, Words Like Kudzu, thanks all who emailed and called on behalf of their poet, Richard Leck. He was buried with dignity in a modest military ceremony at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island on January 23, 2009, and the New York City Mayor's Office paid for it. You can read the follow up Village Voice article here.

Enjoy the Literary Landscape

Uptown: Friday, June 1st, 7:30pm, The Gist Street Reading Series. Pittsburgh poet Deb Bogen's collection, Landscape with Silos, has been called “naked and necessary, unadorned and political, intelligent and generous” (Carol Frost). She’ll be reading tomorrow night along with Scott Hightower coming in from New York, and Francisco Aragón, from San Francisco by way of Indiana.

This monthly reading series, around since 2001, is so popular that our weekly City Paper won’t even list it anymore. “I’d just get angry calls the next day from people who couldn’t get in,” one editor complained. So, if you’re going to go, go early (although I’m told that June is actually not as crazy-crowded as the academic months). Reading starts at 8:00pm, hobnobbing starts at 7:30pm, doors open at 7:15.

Friday, June 1st, 7:30pm
Gist Street Reading Series
James Simon’s sculpture studio
305 Gist Street, 3rd Floor
Uptown, Pittsburgh
$5 bucks admission
BYOB
www.giststreet.org

STACY WAITE READ FROM HER NEW BOOK OF POEMS, 11/17/06

Friday, November 17th, Stacey Waite read to a full room on the University of Pittsburgh campus at a book party for her latest chapbook of poetry, love poem to androgyny. I’d had the pleasure of having lunch with Waite, once, and asked her if she liked to read her work. (I was selfishly looking for good, local writers that I might pair up in readings with my writer friends from out of town, should any of them dare to brave the Pennsylvania Turnpike.) Waite’s reply (essentially,“not very often”) led me to believe that she would perhaps be an adequate reader of her poems but perhaps also best enjoyed on the page.

Not so. Waite blew me away with her powerful, powerful reading by which I mean every cell of her being knew exactly what she had written, knew exactly how to read it, and even if she was nervous (you often have to look at the hands holding the book or the papers to find this out), she was the diametrical opposite of shy.

In my former stomping grounds, Stacey Waite (who is a native of Brooklyn/Long Island but a resident of Pittsburgh for eight years) would be by now a superstar of the downtown New York lesbian performance art scene, working at WOW Theatre or sharing a stage with the Backdoor Boys or being introduced by drag king variety show host, Murray Hill. Or she’d be a cross-country spoken-word favorite, touring with Michelle Tea and her troupe of outraged women writers, Sister Spit. I will admit that Stacey Waite and her insights about gender and feminism and identity, and her top-notch writing, and her absolutely contemporary poetic voice, are not what I expected to come to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and find hidden in a PhD program on the 5th floor of the “Cathedral of Learning.” (But don’t ask me, I knew nothing of what might be found in Pittsburgh.)

I shouldn’t forget to tell you that Waite’s poems are daring and accomplished; they are never boring and they’re not trying to swallow their own meaning as too many poems are. She writes indeed, about androgyny, about being mistaken for a boy by an umpire; for a delivery boy by two high school girls; for a man by a gay man, a waiter, and a security guard at Newark Airport. She has titles like “Dear Gender,” “XY,” “Butch Defines Feminism Under the Following Conditions,” and“On the Occassion of Being Mistaken for a Man by the Cashier in the Drive-Thru Window at a Wendy’s in Madison, Wisconsin.”

You should read Waite’s work not just because she writes so well about the masculinity of her womanhood, but because we’re all part yin and part yang, and Waite so deftly traces the roots of each of these in herself. Along the way, she draws a map of her longings and heartaches, she introduces us to the characters who validated or violated her developing sense of self, and she finds an eroticism that bridges the gaps.

Stacey Waite knows herself well, as a person who has lived in (the contradictions of) her body and as a writer who has learned to excavate and articulate; if I suspected this from reading her writing on the page, I know it for sure after seeing her show up with her work, after hearing her poems in her strong, sure voice.

In the acknowledgements for love poem to androgyny, Waite thanks the “gender warriors” who came before her, and I wonder if anyone outside the politics-of-gender community will ever thank Waite as a writer for being a gender warrior who came before us, who wrote to us so that we could know the history of lost parts of ourselves. Not because we are all oppressed butch lesbians but because we are many of us repressed human beings fitted into productive human citizens; because it is scary to delve into our own histories, alone; because our daily distractions bury the developing selves we were and are and perhaps have no words to lead us back or into the who and the why and the how. Until the right writer comes along.

I wish Stacey Waite a long and prolific writing career, a wide audience, and many more books.

Some of Waite’s poems are available for reading on the web:
http://mainstreetrag.com/S_Waite.html#anchor41939
http://www.poetserv.org/SRR6/waite.html
http://www.pabook.libraries.psu.edu/activities/ppp/current2.html

Friday afternoon, poet Stacey Waite will read at the University of Pittsburgh from her second book of poetry, "Love Poem to Androgyny." Stacey is a native of Brooklyn who has lived in Pittsburgh for eight years now. Her work has one of the strongest, most contemporary voices I've read in an emerging poet in some time.

Read Stacey's poem, "Dear Gender":
http://www.pabook.libraries.psu.edu/activities/ppp/current2.html

Friday, November 17; 4:00-5:30pm; 501 Cathedral of Learning, corner of 5th Avenue and Bigelow, Oakland. Stacey Waite reads from her new collection of poems, "Love Poem to Androgyny"(Winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Competition). Reception and Book signing to follow.