Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis and Howard Levy

9 NOVEMBER 2014 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading and book launch by Howard Levy and Suzanne Lummis, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Howard Levy’s new book of poems is Spooky Action at a Distance, charting questions about human isolation and connection. His first full-length book of poems is A Day This Lit. His work has been published in such journals as Poetry, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and American Poetry Review. He has been closely involved with Frost Place, Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire and its Festival of Poetry and has been a faculty member both for the festival and the Advanced Seminar. He has also taught at museums, particularly the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the 1970s he founded Artist Teaching, an interdisciplinary group of artists (composers, dancers, painters, and poets) who developed a unique approach to museum teaching at the Metropolitan. He also did two residencies at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. Among his honors are a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant in Poetry and finalist in the 92nd St. Y Poetry Center’s Discovery Award.
Suzanne Lummis’s new book of poems, Open Twenty-Four Hours, is the winner of the seventeenth annual Blue Lynx Prize competition; David St. John says of it, “With candor, power, and poignancy, Suzanne Lummis illuminates the glorious absurdities of our lives, especially the pride and paranoia that arise from living in an urban landscape. Nobody can ride a metaphor bareback better than this poet.” She’s been associated with the Los Angeles “Stand up Poets” of the 1980s who advocated a vibrant oral poetry, as well as strong attention to literary detail and value. She’s also grouped with the “Fresno poets” who studied with Philip Levine, Peter Everwine, and Charles Hanzlicek in the legendary Fresno State University writing program. Her poems have been or are forthcoming in the Knopf anthologies Poems of Murder and Mayhem, Poems of the American West, and Human and Inhuman Monstrous Verse. Her book of poems In Danger was published in the California Poetry Series (Heyday). In 2013, NPR’s “All Things Considered” featured her segment, “Writing Noir Poetry, with LA as a Backdrop.”