Once a year, the Poetics Group asks four Grad Center students with new books to get together, read each other’s work, and talk about it on stage. You get to hear some of the exciting new poetry and prose coming out of our community, and you get to hear it discussed by its authors. We call it the Showcase Showdown. The authors interview each other on stage about selected poems from their new books, and the conversation is interspersed with readings and followed by questions and discussion. The public is welcome.
2009
Our second annual showcase of new books by Grad Center students featured Andy Fitch, author of Sixty Morning Walks; Erica Kaufman, author of Censory Impulse; Anna Moschovakis, author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone; and Simone White, author of Dolly. It took place Thursday, Feb. 26, 6:30 pm, in Room 4406 the English Department Lounge.
2008
Our first Showcase Showdown featured the work of Jenny Boully, author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings; Cecily Parks, author of Field Folly Snow; Chris Schmidt, author of The Next in Line; and Douglas Martin, author of In the Time of Assignments. It happened on May 2, 2008, at 4 pm, in the DSC study lounge (room 5409).
About the authors.
Jenny Boully has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and is currently completing a Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center. Her books include The Body (Slope Editions), One Love Affair (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books, 2007). Her work has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems.
Andy Fitch is the author of 60 Morning Walks (Editions Eclipse). 10 Walks/2 Talks, his collaboration with Jon Cotner, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Recently he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, “Pop Poetics: Between Lyric and Language,” in the English Department.
Erica Kaufman is the author of Censory Impulse (Factory School 2009), as well as a number of chapbooks. She co-curates Belladonna and Belladonna Books and is currently a doctoral candidate in the English Department.
Douglas A. Martin is the author of the novels Outline of My Lover and Branwell; a collection of short stories, They Change the Subject; a poetry collection, In the Time of Assignments; as well as Your Body Figured, which consists of three novellas. He has a PHD in English from the Graduate Center and has taught writing at the New School for Social Research and at Wesleyan University.
Anna Moschovakis is the author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press), a translator of French poetry and prose, and an editor and book designer at Ugly Duckling Presse. She has an MFA from Bard College and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature Department.
Cecily Parks’ chapbook, Cold Work, won the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2007 and Tin House, and she is the author of Field Folly Snow (U of Georgia). She is a PhD candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center.
Christopher Schmidt’s doctoral dissertation in English is concerned with waste in post-war art and literature. His poems and essays can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Tin House, Court Green, Canadian Poetry, and BUTT. His first book of poems, The Next in Line, was published with Slope Editions in 2008.
Simone White’s recent work appears in Ploughshares, Tuesday; An Art Project (for which she received a nomination for the 2009 Pushcart Prize), and in the exhibition catalog for The Studio Museum’s Flow. She is a Cave Canem fellow with an MFA from the New School and a JD from Harvard Law School. Currently she is a doctoral student in the English Department. Her chapbook, Dolly, from Q Ave Press, is a collaboration with painter Kim Thomas.
