Rhapsodomancy: A Reading Series in Los Angeles

Rhapsodomancy Announces the Writers Reading on Sunday, June 8, 2008

NINA REVOYR JASON BREDLE LOUISE MATHIAS DENNIS FULGONI

Sunday, June 8, 2008
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:30pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles, 90027 (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla@yahoo.com (RSVP not required, but appreciated)
$3 suggested donation at door.
There will be a cash bar.
www.rhapsodomancy.org

Nina Revoyr was born in Japan, the only child of a Japanese mother and a white American father. She grew up in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and from the age of nine, Los Angeles, and she received her MFA from Cornell University. Nina is the author of three novels, The Necessary Hunger, Southland, and The Age of Dreaming. Her second novel, Southland, was a BookSense 76 pick, won the Ferro Grumley and Lambda Literary Awards, and was one of the Los Angeles Times’ "Best Books of 2003." Library Journal has called her new novel, The Age of Dreaming, “Fast-moving, riveting, unpredictable and profound.” Booklist has said, “Rare indeed is a novel this deeply pleasurable and significant,” and Los Angeles Magazine writes that “Nina Revoyr…is fast becoming one of the city’s finest chroniclers and myth-makers.” Nina has taught at Cornell University, Antioch University, and Occidental College; and has worked for more than a decade in the fields of child welfare and public education.

Jason Bredle is the author of Standing in Line for the Beast, selected by Barbara Hamby as winner of the 2006 New Issues Poetry Prize, and A Twelve Step Guide, winner of the 2004 New Michigan Press chapbook contest. His most recent book, Pain Fantasy, was released by Red Morning Press in summer 2007. He lives in Chicago.

Louise Mathias grew up in England and Los Angeles, and currently splits her time between Southern California and South Bend, Indiana. She is the author of Lark Apprentice, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize, and published by New Issues Press in 2004. Her poems have been published in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Epoch, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly and The Journal. Poems from her new manuscript-in-progress The Traps, appear or are forthcoming in Triquarterly, Massachusetts Review, and Pool. She was educated at the University of Southern California, and works as a fundraising consultant.

Dennis Fulgoni's stories have appeared in Parting Gifts, Quarterly West, the Colorado Review, and New Stories from the Southwest. He was the winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award, a James Kirkwood Award for Fiction through UCLA, and a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize. He teaches high school English at John Marshall High School and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

See you in June!

Thanks to the wonderful writers and great crowd who helped make the April reading phenomenal! Stay tuned for the announcement about June's line-up, and save the date: June 8.

Rhapsodomancy Announces the Writers Reading on Sunday, April 6, 2008

ROB ROBERGE KAREN HARRYMAN ANA THORNE ROBERT D. MONTOYA

Sunday, April 6, 2008
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:30pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles, 90027 (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla@yahoo.com (RSVP not required, but appreciated)
$3 suggested donation at door.
There will be a cash bar.
www.rhapsodomancy.org

Rob Roberge is the author of the upcoming book of stories Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life (Black Arrow Press, scheduled for 2008), the neo-noir novels More Than They Could Chew (Perennial Dark Alley/Harper Collins, February 2005) and Drive (re-issue, Hollyridge Press, 2006). His stories have been featured in ZYZZYVA, Chelsea, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Ten Writers Worth Knowing Issue of The Literary Review. His work has also been anthologized in Another City (City Lights, 2001) and It’s All Good (Manic D Press, 2004). Rob also teaches writing at a number of programs in the Los Angeles area, including the Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA in Creative Writing and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where he received the Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing in 2003. In his spare time, he plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles area garage/punk bands The Violet Rays, The Danbury Shakes and LA’s seminal (class of 78) punk band Urinals, and restores and rebuilds vintage amplifiers and quack medical devices. For news and more info, visit & or email at www.myspace.com/robroberge

Karen Harryman's poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Poetry New Zealand, and other journals. Her first book of poetry, Auto Mechanic's Daughter, was published in 2007 by Akashic Books. Before moving to Los Angeles with her husband, Kirker, she lived and worked in Kentucky for most of her life. She teaches creative writing at YULA, an orthodox Jewish girls' high school.

Ana Thorne stays busy pursuing creative and academic dreams deferred. She will receive an MA in Humanities in May from Mount St. Mary’s College and will complete her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in December. A finalist in the recent Santa Fe Writers Project competition, Ana’s creative nonfiction piece “No Thank You, Otto Titzling” will appear in the SFWP online journal and in the Mount St. Mary’s literary journal. Born in the Midwest, Ana lived in Seatlle, San Francisco, New York City, and the Virgin Islands before settling in Los Angeles. She is working on a series of essays about her parents and her biracial heritage.

At some point Robert D. Montoya was born in Los Angeles, CA. Having grown up in this sprawling setting, much of his writing is latently (and often overtly) influenced by the city’s multi-nodal, concrete urban environment and sporadic urban parks. Robert attended UCLA, receiving his B.A. in American Literature and Culture with a minor in Biological Anthropology. Other things happened. Robert is currently working toward his Masters of Fine Arts degree, with an emphasis on poetry. Domestic and international travel has strongly influenced Robert’s writing, as have literary figures such as Immanuel Kant, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson (go Transcendentalists!), Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, and Reginald Shepherd. He currently lives in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles.

One of the Best!

Thanks to everyone who came out on Feb. 24, 2008. It was a fantastic reading! See you in April!

Rhapsodomancy Announces the Writers Reading on Sunday, February 24, 2008

ELLEN BASS FRANK X. GASPAR GLEAH POWERS ROBERT W. FOX

Sunday, February 24, 2008
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:15pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla@yahoo.com
$3 suggested donation at door; after expenses, a portion of the proceeds will benefit a nonprofit to be determined.
There will be a cash bar.
www.rhapsodomancy.org

Ellen Bass's most recent book of poetry, The Human Line, was published by Copper Canyon Press this year and was named a Notable Book of 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her previous book, Mules of Love (BOA, 2002) won the Lambda Literary Award. Her work has been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac and her poem “Gate C22” was included in Roger Housden’s best-selling anthology, Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again (Harmony, 2007). Her work has been published in many journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, Ms., Ploughshares, Field, and The Kenyon Review. Among her awards for poetry are The Pushcart Prize, the Elliston Book Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, the Larry Levis Prize from Missouri Review, the New Letters Prize, the Greensboro Award, the Chautaqua Poetry Prize, and a Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She co-edited, with Florence Howe, the groundbreaking book, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973) and her nonfiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (HarperCollins, 1996), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988) which has been translated into twelve languages. She teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Frank X. Gaspar was born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts and now lives in Southern California. He is Professor of English at Long Beach City College. He also teaches poetry and novel writing in the summer program at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He served three and a half years in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam Conflict and attended colleges and universities after his discharge, receiving an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Gaspar is the author of four books of poetry and one novel. His short stories and poems have been published widely in literary journals, including The Nation, The Harvard Review, The New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Provincetown Arts, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, The Tampa Review, The Denver Quarterly, and others. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies including, The Beacon Best Poetry of 1999, The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, and others. Gaspar is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and his work is included in the 1996 Best American Poetry and in Best American Poetry 2000. He is the recipient of three Puschcart Prizes for literature, and the Edgar Stanley Award and a Readers’ Choice Award both from Prairie Schooner. He is currently working on new poems and a new novel.

Gleah Powers received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles where she recently taught an undergraduate writing workshop. While in the MFA program she completed her first novel set in the 1960s southwest desert of Phoenix, the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale and the streets of Hollywood. Gleah has worked professionally as an actress, dancer and painter in New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City. She currently lives in Santa Monica and is at work on a second novel.

Born over a half a century ago during a different millennia in New York's scenic Hudson Valley, Robert W. Fox has been around, and mostly in a good way. Robert became a writer at the suggestions of friends who liked his witty e-mail responses. Much to his own surprise, Robert found out he is actually not that bad. He has a brand spankin new MFA degree in Creative Nonfiction. He has been published in LA Weekly, and even had a quasi-socialist letter to the editor printed in The Sunday New York Times Business Section. That must take talent. Not having found love, and therefore with no family, Robert has found his family and happiness teaching creative writing to teenage prostitutes and gang-bangers at Central Juvenile Hall in Lincoln Heights, LA.

Happy New Year

See you February 24, 2008!

Rhapsodomancy Announces the Writers Reading on Sunday, December 16, 2007

MAGGIE NELSON EMILY RAPP MAUREEN ALSOP CATHERINE DUPREE

Sunday, December 16, 2007
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:15pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla@yahoo.com
$3 suggested donation at door; after expenses, a portion of the proceeds will benefit a nonprofit to be determined.
There will be a cash bar.
www.rhapsodomancy.org

Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of a critical book about poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007), a fourth collection of poems, Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), and a nonfiction book about sexual violence, criminal justice, media spectacle, and her family titled The Red Parts: A Memoir(Free Press, 2007). Previous books include a mixed-genre narrative titled Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005), which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and the poetry collections The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003) and Shiner (Hanging Loose Press, 2001). After living in New York City for many years, she moved to Los Angeles in 2005. A recipient of a 2007 Arts Writers Grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, she currently teaches on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Valencia, CA.

Emily Rapp is Core Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles. A former Fulbright scholar, she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry at the University of Texas-Austin. Her first book, Poster Child: A Memoir, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007 and is due out in paperback in January 2008. She has received awards and recognition for her work from The Atlantic Monthly, StoryQuarterly, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow. She was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University and was recently awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Women Writers. She is currently at work on a novel.

Maureen Alsop's first full collection of poetry, Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag) was recently released. Her poems have appeared or are pending in various publications including: The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, Typo, Columbia : A Journal of Literature and Art and Texas Review. She was the winner of Harpur Palate's 2007 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and Bitter Oleander’s 2007 Frances Locke Memorial Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Catherine Dupree's work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Connecticut Review, National Geographic Traveler, Boston magazine, Harvard magazine, and Nylon. She was a fiction resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY, and at the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE. In 2006, she received a creative fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. She was born and raised in Cambridge, Mass.

December 16, 2007 Line-up

On Sunday, December 16, 2007, Rhapsodomancy is pleased to have writers Maggie Nelson, Emily Rapp, Maureen Alsop and Catherine Dupree. More details to come. Please mark your calendars!

Rhapsodomancy featured in L.A. Times, November 1, 2007

Click here to read the article.

--------------------
Hit the town, read a book
--------------------

A salon in a saloon? L.A. book fans are getting lit in a whole new way.

By Pauline O'Connor
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Nov 1 2007

FOR far too long, Los Angeles -- the largest book-buying market in the country -- was stuck with an undeserved reputation as a cultural wasteland where nobody reads. It was a ludicrous put-down, given L.A.'s well-documented literary pedigree as home to a multitude of talents both native (Ray Bradbury, Charles Bukowski) and imported (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner). But the truth can no longer be denied. L.A.'s lit scene continues to grow and thrive, powered by a battalion of independent bookstores, small presses, writing programs and blogs.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-gd-cvr1nov01,0,5797817.story?coll=cl-lat-homepage

::Happy Third Anniversary::

Thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate with us at the third anniversary on Sunday, October 28, 2007! Photos to come, and announcement of the December 16 line-up. Stay tuned.