BONK! 40–Saturday, January 14th
January 9, 2012
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
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JAMIE KAZAY was born in Hollywood, CA. She writes poetry and often dabbles with one-act plays. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from California State University, Northridge and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College, where she teaches writing. She is also a lecturer at the City Colleges of Chicago. Her work has been published in Northridge Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Poetry Super Highway. She has also published a chapbook, titled Small Hollering (Dancing Girl Press, 2011).
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FAMILIES joined together in early 2008 in Chicago, as friends Justin Rose, Erica Johnson, and David Shay found themselves telling stories wrapped in simple music. They are folk story tellers, with souls of grass and minds made out of the mountains, weaving personal tales from the Bible. Families is about community, folklore, and the Kingdom.
BONK! 39–Saturday, December 17th
December 10, 2011
THE BLACK-EYED PRESS
312 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
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LARRY SAWYER thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever, but you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun. When he’s not engaging in satiric japery, he edits milkmag.org, curates the Myopic Books Poetry Series in Chicago, and is a member of the core faculty of The Chicago School of Poetics (chicagoschoolofpoetics.com). His first full-length collection is titled Unable to Fully California (Otoliths Press), of which David Shapiro wrote “It is not so much a strange poetry as the poetry of a stranger, the way Bishop was a Brazilian in Boston and a Bostonian in Brazil. I fell in love with your ‘blue fruit’ and ‘inescapable tomorrow,’ also what seems like renunciation not of sentimentality but of cliché …I like even the quasi-Romantic dislocations here: ‘There is a beauty to ice / only a statue understands.’ I’m not a statue, so I only partially understand, but that should be more than enough for Larry Sawyer’s uncanny picnic on no grass … seemed as real as the Bronx, and I couldn’t stop thinking: I am so lucky that this poetry is so good.” Sawyer’s poetry, essays, and reviews have also been published or are forthcoming in Action, Yes; The Argotist (UK); The Chicago Tribune; Coconut; Court Green; Esque; Exquisite Corpse; Jacket2; The Miami Sun Post; Moria; The National Poetry Review; Otoliths (Australia); Paper Tiger (Australia); The Prague Literary Review (Czech Republic); ReadMe; Seven Corners; Skanky Possum; The Tiny; Van Gogh’s Ear (France); Vanitas; Verse Daily; VLAK (Czech Republic); Ygdrasil; and elsewhere, and his work was anthologized in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for a New Century (Cracked Slab Books).
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NAOMI MARIE is a solo acoustic artist hailing from the heart of the midwest, in the twin cities of Minnesota. She began her musical endeavors at a very young age and grew up with an increasing love for composition. Through various stages, she acquired the skills of a guitar player, a pianist, and a distinctive vocalist. While her sounds are derived from 40′s jazz singers , folk guitar players, and contemporary piano pop, she is, essentially, a story teller. Her songs are made up of lyrical narratives, giving voice to the emotionally driven melodic expressions. In August of 2011, Naomi recorded her first E.P, Four Miles to Story City, in Kenosha, WI at Skies Fall Studios. She has since relocated from Minneapolis, MN to Kenosha and is currently a student.
Bonk! 38–Saturday, November 19th
November 12, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
LAURA GOLDSTEIN’s poetry, reviews, and essays can be found in American Letters and Commentary, MAKE, jacket2, EAOGH, Requited, Little Red Leaves, How2, Seven Corners, Text/Sound, Rabbit Light Movies, Otoliths, CutBank Reviews, and Moria. She has written four chapbooks to date: Let Her, to be released by Dancing Girl Press in 2012, Facts of Light from Plumberries Press (2011), Day of Answers from Tir Aux Pigeons (2009), and Ice in Intervals from Hex Press (2008). She currently co-curates the Red Rover reading series with Jennifer Karmin and teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University.
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KELSEY GRAY is a local poet, student, lock technician, mother, and mentor. Since a young age she has been very involved in her community, doing volunteer work, organizing neighborhood events, attending marches, and facilitating youth groups. She is currently a member of the Safe Start Youth Council for the Women’s Resource Center. You may have seen her around performing at local open mics and other poetry functions. Her poetic influences are Tupac and Emily Dickinson. The goal she hopes to accomplish with her writing is to spread a message to the brainwashed masses, and in the process of spreading that message, remove a few blindfolds.
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HUNTER McKENZIE is a Lake County- and Kenosha-based singer-songwriter and poet. His songs weave the haunting echoes of the delta blues with Irish-tinged Appalachian folk, telling stories in sparse verses that explore love, war, and spirituality. A multi-instrumentalist, he is often spotted in coffee shops and tall trees.
Bonk! 37–Saturday, October 8th
September 16, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
Lily Brown was born and raised in Massachusetts. She holds degrees from Harvard University and Saint Mary’s College of California. Her chapbooks include The Renaissance Sheet (Octopus Books) and Old with You (Kitchen Press). Rust or Go Missing, from Cleveland State University Press, is her first full-length book of poetry. Currently, Brown lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is a PhD student at the University of Georgia. Her book received this praise from Michael Palmer: “Reading Lily Brown’s poems, I feel myself in the presence of an electric consciousness gazing at the temporal rifts and physical folds beneath landscapes and the manifold tensions between bodies. Poetic language here is an instrument of thought or, rather, of a thinking that breathes and is embodied and seeks a new path.”
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Claire Becker is the author of the poetry collection Where We Think It Should Go from Octopus Books and the chapbooks Untoward, Get You , Young Adult, We Know in 2010, We Survive, and The Werld. She co-edits the journal RealPoetik with Lily Brown and teaches in the high school mainstream program at the California School for the Blind. Graham Foust says this of Becker’s work: “Poems should go to where we think, which means that they often end up in the loneliest, most impossible places. . . . Claire Becker’s poems seem both driven by that impulse and in love with that result. They’ve got a throb at which it’s hard not to wonder and, like more than one of us, an aching oddball soul.”
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Marco Jaimez is a musician from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He played at Bonk 10 with David Algrim as part of the group Ihavethreehands. He has been part of a few music projects such as Chopo Bazaar, The Bear Approves, and The Fiendish Dr. Wu. Mexico City Is Sinking is his current solo, acoustic music project. You can check out his music on Twitter: twitter.com/mcissinking and Facebook: facebook.com/mexicocityissinking
Bonk! 36–Saturday, September 3rd
August 29, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
Robert Fernandez was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1980, but grew up in South Florida. After earning a B.A. in English, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he graduated with an M.F.A. in Poetry in 2006. Also in 2006, he and the poet Mary Hickman founded Cosa Nostra Editions, a letter-press chapbook press dedicated to publishing early career poets. Through 2006-2007 he published extensively in the now defunct journal The Modern Review. His poems have also appeared in 1913, American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, Volt, Fence, Octopus, The Canary, Aufgabe, and elsewhere. Fernandez is the recipient of a PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. We Are Pharaoh, his first collection of poems, was selected for publication from a 2009 open reading by the editors of Canarium Books. A second manuscript, a book-length lyric sequence titled Pink Reef, is forthcoming from Canarium. Fernandez currently lives in Iowa City, where he teaches literature and is a graduate fellow in the University of Iowa’s Ph.D. program in English.
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Joshua Edwards is founder and co-editor of The Canary literary journal and Canarium Books (www.canariumbooks.org), a poetry press sponsored by the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA and worked as a creative writing instructor. His poems have appeared in Slate, Colorado Review, The Literary Review, Northwest Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and his translations of Mexican poet Maria Baranda have appeared in Chicago Review, Circumference, LIT, Washington Square, and Zoland Poetry. Ficticia, his translation of Baranda’s book-length poem, was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. He’s received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright-Garcia Robles Program, Vermont Studio Center, Zoland Poetry, University of Michigan International Institute, and Stanford University, where he is currently a Stegner Fellow. Campeche, published in 2011 by Noemi Press, is Edwards’s cautionary lyric composed of poems and photographs (by collaborator Van Edwards) in which a real place is overlaid with the parable of a mythical world on the verge of an apocalyptic flood.
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Mark Bilbrey graduated from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Georgia’s doctoral program in English. His poetry and prose have appeared in Versal, LIT, 42Opus, Verse online, Straylight, and Action Yes. Currently, he is finishing his first poetry manuscript, The Dog Poems. He also teaches composition and creative writing in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where he advises the poetry editors of Straylight Literary Arts Magazine.
Bonk! 35–Saturday, August 27th
August 6, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
Jim Osborne has been retired for 19 years, but remains active as a poet, writing for fun (except when he has an axe to grind). He has studied English, poetry, fiction writing, ceramics, and furniture building at UW-Whitewater and UW-Parkside. He describes most of his poems as light fantasy about the simple things in life.
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Afaa Michael Weaver attended the University of Maryland before entering the world of factory life for fifteen years. During that time, he wrote and published poetry, short fiction, and freelance journalism, while also founding 7th Son Press and Blind Alleys, a literary journal. Weaver later earned a BA in Literature through Excelsior College and an MA in Brown University’s graduate writing program, focusing on theater and playwriting. His first book of poetry, Water Song, was published in 1985. Since then, Weaver has published several more collections of poetry, including The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005; Multitudes; Sandy Point; and The Ten Lights of God. His full length play Rosa was produced in 1993 at Venture Theater in Philadelphia. His short fiction appears in Gloria Naylor’s Children of the Night and in Maria Gillan’s Identity Lessons. Weaver has been a Pew Fellow in poetry and also taught at National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts as a Fulbright Scholar. Currently, he is the Alumnae Professor of English and director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center at Simmons College in Boston. In addition, he is Chairman of the Simmons International Chinese Poetry Conference. (http://www.poets.org/poets.php/prmPID/170)
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Oliver Bixby is an acoustic artist who writes his own music and lyrics. He began playing when he was six and his mother required all her children to learn an instrument. Bixby is also part of a band called The Andes which includes his brothers; they’ve played all over Racine and Milwaukee. The new Oliver Bixby album is called Tumblecreep and will be available for download and on cd Saturday, August 27th, the very same day he plays BONK! An album release party will be held at B4S afterwards. Woo Hoo!
No Tim Yu…Yes Anne Shaw
July 12, 2011
We interrupt your regularly scheduled BONK! blog post to inform you that, due to a wonderful bundle of joy possibly coming a bit earlier than expected, Tim Yu will be unable to join us for this month’s BONK! And yes, we are heavy weepy with this news.
The lucky-ducky flip side to this seemingly sordid coin?: the one, the only, the revelator Anne Shaw will be coming through town just as we prepare to BONK! it up. Furthermore, she has agreed to take Tim’s spot this month and so we will be showered upon with poetry amazingness.
As if you needed further convincing, here is a video of Anne reading for BONK! back in 2009. May this video fill you with the happiness you’ve been seeking all your life and may we all commune gayly this July 23rd ofr a BONK! among BONK!s. Enjoy:
BONK! 34–Sat, July 23rd
July 5, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
BONK! 33-Sat. June 25th
June 2, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
BONK! 32–Saturday, May 7th
April 27, 2011
RACINE ARTS COUNCIL
316 6TH STREET
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
Tom Hibbard grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. He graduated with a B.A. from Amherst College in Massachusetts and began writing as a newspaper reporter for the Progressive afternoon daily in Madison, Wisconsin, The Capital Times. Hibbard has lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Kansas. His writing has been published in many places on and off-line, including Jacket, Exquisite Corpse, Word For/ Word and Big Bridge. Besides his poetry, he has also published essays and reviews of contemporary poets, including David Meltzer, Amiri Baraka, Larry Sawyer and Mark Wallace. Among Hibbard’s collections are Critique of North American Space (Bronze Skull), Human Powers and Place of Uncertainty (available online at Otoliths storefront). In 2010 he ran unsuccessfully for the Wisconsin state legislature, and this year for the fourth time he swam on New Years Day with the Polar Bear club in Lake Michigan.
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