LITTORAL: Harry Matthews
Harry Matthews is the author of various novels, poems, short fiction,
and essays from New York (1930). He settled in Europe in 1952, and since then has lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. In 1978, he returned to the United States to teach for several years at Bennington College, Columbia University, and the New School University. Now married to the French writer Marie Chaix, he divides his time between Paris and Key West. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the “ New York School of poets”, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Keneth Koch, James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Oulipo Compendium (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
LITTORAL: Brooklyn Rail Turns 10
The Brooklyn Rail turns ten this year and that is certainly cause for celebration. Please join Rail Fiction/Intranslation editor Donald Breckenridge as he hosts an epic night of readings from some of the most innovative authors and translators brightening the literary landscape.
“As a self-taught writer and ardent reader of formally experimental fiction, my goal over the last decade has been to highlight the talents of emerging writers, many of whom live in Brooklyn, as well as to showcase the current writing of established authors who have been marginalized by an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven publishing industry.”–Donald Breckenridge
Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments,including her groundbreaking work of hyper-fiction, Patchwork Girl. She is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy and the novel Half Life. Her work as appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, and The Paris Review.
Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World, KambyBolongo Mean River, and the forthcoming Asunder. His work has appeared in Bomb, The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, and Nerve.
Lewis Warsh is co-founder, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books. He is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, most recently, Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005, and the novel, A Place in the Sun. He is director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University.
Johannah Rodgers is the author of Sentences, a collection of short stories,essays, and drawings and the chapbook, Necessary Fictions. Her stories, essays,and reviews have appeared in Fence, Bookforum, Fiction, CHAIN Arts, Pierogi Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches writing and literature courses at CUNY, where she is an assistant professor in English.
Dawn Raffel’s short story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, was just released. She is also the author of Carrying the Body and In the Year of Long Division. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Art & Letters and numerous other periodicals and anthologies.
Joshua Cohen is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Eugene Marten is the author of In The Blind, Waste, and Firework. He lives in New York City.
John Reed is the author of five novels: A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance,The Whole, All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare, and Tales of Woe. He is the Books Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.
Fran Gordon, founder of the National Art Club’s PAGE reading series, also directs FDU’s MFA in Writing reading series. Her novel, Paisley Girl, was a finalist for QPB’s New Voices Award. She teaches in The New School Writing Program, and for The Pan African Literary Festival.
Yasmine Alwan is the author of Elsewhere and co-editor of Tantalum, a magazine for new prose.
Douglas Glover is one of Canada’s finest writers. In 2006, he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award,he was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005, and the recipient of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 2003. He is the author of eight books of fiction and essays, including The Enamoured Knight, his elebrated book on the character of Don Quixote and its eponymous novel. He lives in upstate New York.
Sarah French has had her fiction works published Bomb, The New Review of Literature,and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently working on a novel.
Susan Bernofsky is the translator of four books by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The 2006 recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, she has also received awards and fellowships from the NEH, NEA, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently writing two books: a biography of Robert Walser, and a novel set in her hometown, New Orleans.
Translator Alyson Waters teaches literary translation and contemporary French language literature at Yale University. In the past few years, she has won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant, a PEN translation grant, and a “bourse de sejour aux traducteurs estrangers.” She lives in Prospect Heights with her husband and daughter.
Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translations include works by Guy Debord, Jean Piaget,Jean-Patrick Manchette, Paco Ignacio Taibo, J.B. Pontalis & Jean Laplanche, Thierry Jonquet, Henri Lefebvre, and Raoul Vaneigem. His most recent translation is of Apollinaire’s letters to Madeleine, as sent from the trenches of Champagne in 1915. Born in Manchester, England, Nicholson-Smith is a longtime denizen of Brooklyn.
Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein, the novels 6/2/95 and You Are Here. His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Amiri Baraka and Henry Grimes with special guest Atiba Kwabena-Wilson
ISSUE Project Room is proud to host its first Littoral Reading Series event of 2009 featuring:
Amiri Baraka and Henry Grimes
$10 – buy tickets
In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Home–long out of print–features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of 1960s social and political essays.
Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span–a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X . . . each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.
Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities, from 2002-2004. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic, 2007), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.
Henry Grimes
Master jazz musician (acoustic bass, violin) HENRY GRIMES has played more than 3OO concerts in 23 countries (including many festivals) since May of ‘O3, when he made his astonishing return to the music world after 35 years away. He was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended the Mastbaum School and Juilliard. In the ‘5O’s and ‘6O’s, he came up in the music playing and touring with Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, “Bullmoose” Jackson, “Little” Willie John, and a number of other great R&B / soul musicians; but drawn to jazz, he went on to play, tour, and record with many great jazz musicians of that era, including Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Sunny Murray, Sonny Rollins, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, and Rev. Frank Wright.
Sadly, a trip to the West Coast to work with Al Jarreau and Jon Hendricks went awry, leaving Henry in Los Angeles at the end of the ‘6O’s with a broken bass he couldn’t pay to repair, so he sold it for a small sum and faded away from the music world. Many years passed with nothing heard from him, as he lived in his tiny rented room in an S.R.O. hotel in downtown Los Angeles, working as a manual laborer, custodian, and maintenance man, and writing many volumes of handwritten poetry. He was discovered there by a Georgia social worker and fan in 2OO2 and was given a bass by William Parker, and after only a few weeks of ferocious woodshedding, Henry emerged from his room to begin playing concerts around Los Angeles and shortly afterwards made a triumphant return to New York City in May, ‘O3 to play in the Vision Festival. Since then, often working as a leader, he has played, toured, and / or recorded with many of today’s music heroes, such as Rashied Ali, Marshall Allen, Fred Anderson, Marilyn Crispell, Ted Curson, Andrew Cyrille, Bill Dixon, Dave Douglas, Andrew Lamb, David Murray, William Parker, Marc Ribot, and Cecil Taylor. Henry has also given a number of workshops and master classes on major campuses, released several new recordings, made his professional debut on a second instrument (the violin) at the age of 7O, has now published the first volume of his poetry, “Signs Along the Road,” and has been creating illustrations to accompany his new recordings and publications. He has received many honors in recent years, including four Meet the Composer grants and a grant from the Acadia Foundation. He can be heard on more than 
recordings on various labels, including Atlantic, Ayler Records, Blue Note, Columbia, ESP-Disk, Impulse!, Jazz NewYork Productions, Pi Recordings, Porter Records, Prestige, Riverside, and Verve. Henry Grimes now lives and teaches in New York City.
Atiba Kwabena-Wilson (musician/poet/storyteller) is the founder and artistic director of both Songhai Djeli and the Befo’ Quotet. He was the recipient of a full Scholarship for voice and flute, earning his B.A. in Music from Long Island University. Mr. Kwabena-Wilson studied arrangement and orchestration for jazz ensembles with Calvin Hill (bassist with Max Roach and faculty advisor for L.I.U.). He also studied Jazz Improvisation with the late John Lewis (pianist with the Modern Jazz Quartet and professor at City College).
Atiba visited Jamaica in February of 2004, where he was interviewed by Jean Small, host of “A Festival of Words” on Radio Mona FM 93. He spoke of his life’s journey which has led him to poetry and storytelling.
In 2005, Atiba was featured in “Uptown” magazine, summer issue.
Throughout the years, Atiba Kwabena-Wilson has been involved with numerous projects and programs that have reached out to many people. An abbreviated list of his performance profile is provided below:
* Guest Lecturer at Hunter College (subjects: “African Origins of the Blues” and “African Origins of Hip-Hop”)
* Served as artistic director through Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, 1999-present, of “Music Meets Poetry” series
* Toured schools under the auspices of the Julliard-Lincoln Center Community Out-Reach Program, both as a solo artist and as a member of “Ngoma”, performing traditional songs, stories and dances of Azania (aka South Africa)
* Performed at FESTAM International Music Festival, Inc. in Dakar, Senegal 1998 through 2000
* Filmed with the Grammy Award Winning Rap group ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (MTV Unplugged)
* Featured in “Bum Rush the Page- A Def Poetry Jam”, Edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera, Three Rivers Press 2001 and “New Rain” Vol. 9 Edited by Gary Johnston and Malika M’Buzi Moore, Blind Beggar Press 1999
* Appeared as percussionist/ flutist on “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” Vol.1: A CD focusing on poetry by Tupac Shakur, performed by various artists
* Appeared as a performing artist for the American Museum of Natural History
* Featured on CBS, Traditions
* Provided “Edu-tainment Clinics” for Hospital Audiences Inc.
* Conducted storytelling and music workshops for the New York City Housing Authority
* Provides music, poetry and storytelling workshops, staff development seminars, assembly programs, concerts and lecture/ demonstrations throughout the tri-state area under the auspices of the Caribbean Cultural Center, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. Education Dept. and Henry Street Settlement Cultural Outreach/Ed. Dept.
