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!
