NewYearPoetBash! Freedman/AD/Heinemann/Samuels/Robinson/Townsend

It’s 2020! So let’s combine two poetry readings into one! And have a new year poetry extravaganza! Poets include Lewis Freedman, Clay A.D., Caspar Heinemann, Lisa Samuels, Elizabeth Robinson, and Jamie Townsend.

Lewis Freedman is a writer of unsized transgressions. Texts bound and circulating under this name include Am Perhaps Yet (Oxeye), Residual Synonyms for the Name of God (Ugly Duckling), and Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well Greased). Another text, I Want Something Other than Time, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Caspar Heinemann is an artist, writer and poet based in London. His solo exhibitions have been presented at Outpost Gallery, Norwich; Almanac, London; and KevinSpace, Vienna. Recent group exhibitions have been held at Georg Kargl Fine Arts,Vienna; ICA, London; Cabinet, London; and PDX Contemporary, Portland. Heinemann participated in the 2019 Bergen Assembly, and has recently read at Camden Arts Centre, Sussex Poetry Festival and Tate Modern. His first poetry collection ‘Novelty Theory’ was published in 2019 by The 87 Press.

Clay AD was born on the edge of genetically modified cornfield and a haunted suburb in Indianapolis, Indiana. Now based in Berlin they flirt with concepts of illness, ecology, death, science fiction, somatic transformation, the urgency of diy aesthetics and the politics and negotiations of care under capitalism. AD’s interdisciplinary practice is a constellation of collective work, writing prose and poetry, playing music, offering bodywork, dance, and collage. Their first novel, “Metabolize, If Able” is available through Arcadia Missa Press UK and was named a finalist in the 31st Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. They are currently developing a somatic audio practice guide to navigate gender dysphoria which will be available online for free through Heavy Heavy Breathing in February 2020.

Lisa Samuels is a transnational poet who also works with sound, film, and art installations. She is the author of many books of poetry, memoir, and prose, recently Symphony for Human Transport (Shearsman 2017), Foreign Native (Black Radish 2018), and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (Chax 2019). She also publishes essays in creative theory and edits and curates work in poetics. A citizen of Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she is Professor of English at the University of Auckland, Lisa is visiting the Bay Area in transit from a lucky sabbatical in Montreal and Antwerp.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several books, including the National Poetry Series winner Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend. On Ghosts was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry in 2013. Robinson’s creative nonfiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions and Scoundrel Time. With Jennifer Phelps, she is the co-editor of Quo Anima: innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry, published by University of Akron Press in 2019.

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks including, most recently, Pyramid Song (above/ground press; 2018) as well as the full-length collection SHADE (Elis Press; 2015). They are the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat; 2019), and an essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books; 2017).