The Birth of a Press Part 6: CavanKerry’s Commitment to Community
Why Publish with CavanKerry Press?
Kari O’Driscoll Writes a Love Letter to Gen Z
Paola Corso Interviews Fred Shaw
The Birth of a Press Part 5: CavanKerry’s Commitment to the Art of Fine Literature
Teresa Carson on Poetry: Holly Smith & NJ Poetry Out Loud
Kevin Carey on “Night Swimming – Assumption College – 1979”
CANCELED: Women and Work Reading with Cindy Veach and Kate Hanson Foster
CavanKerry Press @ AWP
Visit our booth & authors! Exhibit Space T2260
Mark your calendars and join us for the following book signings:
Kari L. O’Driscoll – Thursday, March 5th – 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Gray Jacobik – Thursday, March 5th – 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Brent Newsom – Friday, March 6th – 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Cindy Veach – Friday, March 6th – 11:00am to 12:00pm
Sarah Bracey White – Friday, March 6th – 12:30pm to 2:30pm
Judith Sornberger – Saturday, March 7th – 11:00am to 12:00pm
Harriet Levin Millan – Saturday, March 7th – 12:00pm to 2:00pm
Gray Jacobik – Saturday, March 7th – 2:00pm to 3:30pm
Kari L. O’Driscoll and Sarah Bracey White – Saturday, March 7th – 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Cati Porter participates in OSHER Life Lecture Series reading & discussion, UCR Extension
Tina Kelley TedX Maplewood
Tina is a journalist, poet, and author who received the Maplewood Literary Award in 2018. A 10-year veteran of The New York Times, and 17 year Maplewood resident, Kelley shared a staff Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for its “Portraits of Grief” feature profiles of victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001. The co-author of “Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope,” Kelley published her fourth book of poetry, “Rise Wildly,” in October.
Cindy Veach reads at The Lily Salon
Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanities
Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanitiesporter
Cati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of HumanitiesCati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of HumanitiesportporterCati Porter reads at the Poetic Voices Series at Loma Linda University School of Humanitiesporter
port
Temple University Library Midday Arts Series: Readings by Andrew Mossin and Harriet Levin
Register through Eventbrite
Presented in collaboration with the Intellectual Heritage program
Programs offered by Temple University Libraries are accessible to people with disabilities. Please contact Richie Holland, Director of Library Administration, at [email protected] or 215-204-3455 for more information, to request an accommodation, or with questions/concerns.
Cati Porter reads at the Tuesday Literary Series at the Janet Goeske Center
Pen + Brush Presents Joan Cusack Handler, Ali, Raffel
Pen and Brush Presents… is a reading series founded by Kate Angus and hosted by Pen and Brush. The series supports the work small press editors do in identifying excellent writing, as well as supporting the writing itself, by featuring exciting new work by established and emerging authors. Each month, “Pen and Brush Presents…” features readings by three writers, each one selected by editors at a press, journal, or organization with a strong female editorial presence.
Join us in December to hear from:
Joan Cusack Handler, reading on behalf of CavanKerry Press. Joan, the founder and publisher of CavanKerry Press, is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. She has four published collections: three poetry–GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans, and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. A Bronx native who lives now in Brooklyn, NY and East Hampton, NY, Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.
Ashna Ali, reading on behalf of Bone Bouquet. Ashna is a Brooklyn-based poet, researcher, and educator. Their poetry has appeared in Bone Bouquet, HeART Online, femmescapes, and The Felt, and they have academic work published or forthcoming in Gender Sexuality Italia, Global South, Journal of Narrative Theory, and MAI Feminism and Visual Culture. They are a doctoral candidate of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and they teach Literature at Queens College and Food and Film at The New School.
Dawn Raffel, reading on behalf Dzanc Books. Dawn’s most recent book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, was chosen as one of NPR’s best books of 2018 and awarded a 2019 Christopher Award for books that affirm the highest values of the human spirit. Previous books include a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects; a novel, Carrying the Body; and two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division. Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine, where she served as Executive Articles Editor for seven years, and subsequently held senior-level “at-large” positions at More magazine and Reader’s Digest. In addition, she served as editor of The Literarian, the literary journal of the Center for Fiction in New York. She currently works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations. She has taught at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, and Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Tblisi, Montreal), and continues to lead creative writing workshops, some of which incorporate yoga and yoga nidra.
RSVPs to <[email protected]> are welcome but not required.
Cati Porter reads at The Friends of the Murrieta Library
Cati Porter is a poet, editor, essayist, arts administrator, wife, mother, daughter, friend.
She is the author of eight books and chapbooks, most recently, “My Skies of Small Horses” and “The Body at a Loss.”
She is founder and editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry, established in 2005. She lives in Riverside, California, with her family where she directs the Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit.
George Kalogeris, Crystal Williams, and Margo Taft Stever at Chapter & Verse Series
Joan Cusack Handler Interview | CKP Board Meeting 2019
Danny Shot and Tina Kelley Reads at The Newark Arts Festival
Curated by: Dimitri Reyes
Featured Artist(s): Tina Kelley, Danny Shot, paulA neves, Dimitri Reyes
Poet #1 will begin by reading a poem, where poet #2 will have to recite a poem based on one of the themes from Poet #1. Poet #3 will have to recite a poem based on a theme from poet #2 and so on.
Audience participation will also be encouraged!
CavanKerry Press @ Newark Arts Festival Grand Opening & Street Fair
See CavanKerry Press vending at the Newark Arts Festival!
Join us for opening night of NEWARK ARTS FESTIVAL 2019!
Thursday, October 10th, 4PM – 8PM
1180 Raymond Boulevard, Newark 07102
There is rain in the forecast which means no street fair! But do come by the Headquarters for our Official Grand Opening and Ribbon-Cutting!
Enjoy:
Groovy music
Snap some pics
Pick up your map
Visit the food trucks
Afro Taco Food Truck
Mayor Ras J. Baraka
and
Steve Lovell! and more!
Then head out to all the galleries, pop-ups and events around town!
For more information and a complete listing of Newark Arts Festival events, please visit newarkartsfestival.com.
CavanKerry Press Chosen as a Top 5 Literary Organization that Promotes Community by ezvid
Cati Porter at Mind & Mill Poetry Night
Practice your finger snaps! We are excited to work with RivCo Rocks on a County wide poetry night during Riverside Arts Walk on October 3rd. We are assembling an incredible lineup of poets to perform spoken word and share about poetry events and groups in every region of the County. We will close the night with a special performance by Hunter Lavender. Stay tuned for more details!
Robert Cording’s new book, Without My Asking, is Here!
The Birth of a Press Part 4: Building Our Image
Sarah Sousa at Stockbridge Coffee and Tea
Without My Asking – Pre-Order Now!
The Birth of a Press Part 3: “Strokes of Fortune”
CavanKerry Press Authors Around the Internet!
The Birth of a Press Part 2: “Starting Your Own Press; The Challenge”
The Birth of a Press Part 1: “No Room at the Inn”
Harriet Levin elaborates…
My Water Bottle
Croix de Bouquet, Haiti
The real thing he pulled was greater than the water bottle
turned toy—bottle cap wheels attached to a string—
as it followed behind him across the cracked cement.
In it had been rivers and rain. The strong force of a waterfall.
A stream winding through certain bodies. Another child came running out
the door asking to play with it. I watched the string exchange hands,
loop a finger as the children outran it and their creation rolled,
wobbled, tipped forward on its neck.
The speckled wings fluttered and rose, even as I hid somewhere
in my childhood basement, my mother shouting from the kitchen
to pick up all my toys scattered from their boxes,
toys I held in the darkness of night, clutched close in whispers.
The child without any stood beside me, followed me around,
stayed near, waited until my last sip and my bottle was empty.
He tapped it lightly and my heart burst. It took time
for me to understand. What did I not offer?
The water bottle my fingers gripped in heat so extreme
each knuckle swelled, my breath grew slow, my head pounded,
walking was difficult, thinking, how far can I make it
with nothing to pull along? I’ve nothing,
nothing behind me. No bottle turned toy,
no container empty enough to transform
into a caterpillar’s sixteen bouncing legs,
waiting to grow the wings to support it in air.
In a matter of moments, I could shed my old skin,
pupating my greediness over what I did not offer,
though the boy did not consider me greedy. He waited
so patiently for me to hold the bottle to my lips
and drink the very last drop, having waited under rubble,
himself a survivor, overwintering in ash.
He sat next to me on the cracked cement steps,
leading to the collapsed second floor.
Water could not sustain him. He required nectar
sweet between leaves. It was all over the news.
The water was contaminated. Peacekeepers defecated in water,
bringing cholera to the Artibonite River.
The world’s carelessness now set afloat.
I know. I was ready to discard my bottle,
set it on its journey of decomposition,
strip it of its corporeal form. My bottle,
held in the hands of so many people who will never
drink from it, those who delivered it from earth,
mined it, heated it, spun it a long while to become the axis
on which the day moves, wholly imaginary.
A boy waiting with a string in his hand.
Commentary:
Apart from the 2010 Haiti earthquake which caused an unprecedented natural disaster, the population suffered a man-made disaster when waste from a UN base leaked into the rivers and introduced a cholera epidemic. When I wrote “My Water Bottle” I wanted to depict the resilience of the people I’d met in Haiti. While Haiti is a victim of poverty and corruption, (according to a July 17, 2018 Miami Herald article, 80 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day), it is a place of beauty where everyday people engage in great acts of courage.
Since 2013, I’ve been traveling to Haiti as the leader of a Drexel University creative writing study abroad trip. On the trip we attend workshops at PEN Haiti and meet with renown Haitian writers, poets, artists and musician activists whose life and work cannot avoid representing change. Haitian literature has been compared to Russian literature before the Revolution, because it is that gorgeous, that rich, that filled with foment and despair. One great example is Marie Vieux Chauvet’s masterpiece Love Anger Madness. The early pages depict one of the main characters touching herself in her bed while she hears through her open window the screams of political prisoners who are being tortured in the nearby jail. These two actions are juxtaposed in a way that is uniquely Haitian and characterizes much of Haitian life and consequently its literature. Forrest Gander’s words in his new book, Be With, “the political begins in intimacy,” resonate here.
Besides meeting Haitian artists, our study abroad group fundraises for Love Orphanage, where we engage with the children for days at a time. Love Orphanage’s director Gabriel Fedelus is a father to eighteen children who were orphaned after the earthquake. Unlike the US, Haiti’s governmental agencies do not fund its orphanages. All assistance is received from overseas. The children lack basic needs such as soap and toothpaste not to mention medicine and meat. Needless to say, the children don’t own toys or games. Every penny that the orphanage receives goes toward sustaining the children’s basic needs. I was particularly awakened to this fact when I returned to the orphanage the following morning after one of the children, a six-year-old boy named Olson, asked me for my water bottle, to see he had constructed a pull-toy out of it. I could not help comparing his childhood to mine with its many toys. Are toys a kind of armor or shield against the imagination or do they give root to imaginative impulses? I think of Rilke’s idea of how necessary it is to be bored for the real imagination to grow.
Love Orphanage accepts donations at http://www.loveorphanage.org
No donation is too small.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont reads “Yet”
January Gill O’Neil elaborates…
THE CATHEDRAL
—After Rodin’s The Cathedral
I watch my daughter imitate
the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral.
Her arms curved in slow gyration.
It is her way of understating
the dark bronze, how two arms
can captivate the imagination
in their dizzying swirl,
find balance between
light and shadows. In truth,
the hands are both right hands
turning in on themselves, an architecture
almost sacred, serpentine, yet protective
of the space within, of what the
bronze cannot hold. My daughter bends
uncomfortably away from me, resistant, as if
her whole body is questioning
what it means to be a girl.
She sees—maybe
for the first time—what is there
and what is not from the hollow
her hands make, all the empty angles
that never touch,
the almost-grasp of the intimate.
Her wrists slight and glistening
with summer’s patina,
her fingertips conjure her being
and becoming,
body and soul
closing and opening
at the same time.
A few years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted an expansive exhibit of sculptor Auguste Rodin. My daughter and I fell in love with his sculpture, The Cathedral. We were enthralled. And while she moved on, there was something intimate about two hands almost-grasping. It seemed to be the perfect metaphor for us as she enters her teenage years and we enter a new phase of our relationship.
SAVE 20% on REWILDING now through October 26th!