Bazaar Writers Salon

Readings by J. Bruce Fuller, Jason Labbe, Raina J. León, and Matt W. Miller
Music by Armando Alcaraz
Hosted by Peter Kline

Armando Alcaraz’s original songs are in English and his native Spanish and have influences from both Latin American, traditional Mexican and American folk. Armando uses his songs and music to facilitate transformation, integration, and healing in contemplative contexts.

J. Bruce Fuller is a Louisiana native, and is currently a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His chapbooks include The Dissenter’s Ground, Notes to a Husband, Lancelot, and Flood which won the 2013 Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming at The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, Pembroke Magazine, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature, among others. He is the editor and publisher of Yellow Flag Press. He received a MFA from McNeese and a PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Born in New Britain, Connecticut and raised by a machinist and a waitress, Jason Labbe is the author of a full-length collection, Spleen Elegy (BlazeVOX, 2017), and a handful of chapbooks, including Blackwash Canal (2011) and Dear Photographer (Phylum Press, 2009). His poems, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, A Public Space, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, American Book Review, Washington Square, Gulf Coast, and The Brooklyn Rail. He has taught writing at the University of Virginia, the University of Connecticut, and Southern Connecticut State University. Also a drummer and recording engineer, he has worked with many artists in New England and New York City. He splits his time between Bethany, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York.

Raina J. León, PhD, CantoMundo fellow, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra: (dis)locate (2016) and the chapbook, profeta without refuge (2016). She has received fellowships and residencies with Macondo, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Matt W. Miller is the author of the collections The Wounded for the Water (Salomon Poetry), Club Icarus, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and Cameo Diner: Poems. He has published poems and essays in The Adroit Journal, Harvard Review, Narrative Magazine, Notre Dame Review, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, Memorious, and crazyhorse, among other journals. He was winner of the River Styx Microbrew/Microfiction Prize and Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.