Kathleen FRASER
Katy LEDERER
Will SKINKER

Saturday, October 25, 2008
7PM Doors/7:30 Reading*** (note new time!)

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn’s Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

www.oaklandartgallery.org/about_new/?directions

$5 suggested donation

BIOS

Kathleen Fraser has published eighteen books of poems, most recently W I T N E S S (2007, Chax); Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling (2004, Apogee), and the collaged work hi dde violeth i dde violet (2004, Nomados). Her collected essays, Translating the Unspeakable, Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (2000), are part of the Contemporary Poetics Series. U. of Alabama Press. Her il cuore : the heart, Selected Poems, 1970-1995, is available from Wesleyan University Press. Fraser has collaborated on artist books with Sam Francis, Mary Ann Hayden, David Marshall and Nancy Tokar Miller. Twenty wall pieces from ii ss, a collaboration-in-progress with NY painter Hermine Ford, were recently shown at the Pratt Institute of Architecture in Rome and a capsule version of this show will open at Melville House, in the Dumbo gallery area of Brooklyn, on Nov. 6.

In 1973, Fraser founded The American Poetry Archive, during her tenure as Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Between 1983 and 1992, she published and edited HOW(ever), a journal for poets and scholars interested in modernist/ innovative directions in writing by 20th century women—up-dated to the current electronic journal How2 @ www.how2journal.com

Fraser is winner of a Guggenheim and two N.E.A. Fellowships in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Award for innovative achievement. She currently teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts/SF and lives for the spring months of each year in Italy, lecturing widely on American poetry and translating Italian poets.

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008) as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003 and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year 2003.

Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Paris Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and Isn’t It Romantic? (Verse Press) among other compilations.

Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine. Her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo (2001; 2004; 2005), MacDowell (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005-2006), and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Program.

Will Skinker’s work has appeared in Weigh Station, Mirage/Periodical, Shuffle Boil, Ellipsis, word for/word, digital artifact, and The Denver Quarterly; his poems have been in The Night Palace and Morning Train from Auguste Press, which has also recently published his book Mascara.

He grew up in the mountains of Virginia and moved to Oregon, then California in 2000. He lives in San Francisco with his fiancee Yolanda and their two cats, Tootie and Pablo.