LA-Lit interviews Maggie Nelson
Sunday, March 11 at 3pm
At Betalevel

We’d like to invite you to a live radio recording, reading & conversation this coming Sunday March 11 at 3 p.m. at Betalevel in Chinatown. Maggie Nelson will be the featured writer on LA-lit, a radio show co-curated by Mathew Timmons & Stephanie Rioux. The show (& hence the recording) lasts a little over an hour and will be about 30 minutes of reading & about 30 minutes of questions & answers/further questions – alternating between the two modes in hopes of creating a space for dynamic conversation.

For information about attending the recording go here.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry, including Jane: A Murder, (2005; finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001), as well as the forthcoming collection Something Bright, Then Holes (2007). In 2007 she will also publish The Red Parts, a nonfiction book about her family and criminal justice (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), and a critical study about poetry and painting, Women, The New York School, And Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press). She currently teaches at CalArts, and has taught literature and writing at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Pratt Institute of Art, and Wesleyan University.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 16b: Teresa Carmody is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, November 19th at 3pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem, a micro-collection of short stories, which American Book Review calls “a celebratory lament” and poet Carol Muske Dukes calls “a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own.” Other work has appeared in PoetsWest, Stolen Purse, Roar: Women’s Studies Journal, For Here or To Go, and 4th Street. She is cofounder and editor of Les Figues Press, publisher of the TrenchArt series of experimental literature, and co-curator (with Stan Apps and Ara Shirinyan) the Smell Last Sunday Reading series in downtown Los Angeles.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 16a: Teresa Carmody is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, November 19th at 3pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem, a micro-collection of short stories, which American Book Review calls “a celebratory lament” and poet Carol Muske Dukes calls “a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own.” Other work has appeared in PoetsWest, Stolen Purse, Roar: Women’s Studies Journal, For Here or To Go, and 4th Street. She is cofounder and editor of Les Figues Press, publisher of the TrenchArt series of experimental literature, and co-curator (with Stan Apps and Ara Shirinyan) the Smell Last Sunday Reading series in downtown Los Angeles.

LA-Lit interviews Vanessa Place
Sunday, February 25 at 3pm
At Betalevel

We’d like to invite you to a live radio recording, reading & conversation this coming Sunday February 25 at 3 p.m. at Betalevel in Chinatown. Vanessa Place will be the featured writer on LA-lit, a radio show co-curated by Mathew Timmons & Stephanie Rioux. The show (& hence the recording) lasts a little over an hour and will be about 30 minutes of reading & about 30 minutes of questions & answers/further questions – alternating between the two modes in hopes of creating a space for dynamic conversation.

For information about attending the recording go here.

Vanessa Place is the author of a 50,000-word, one-sentence novel, Dies: A Sentence (2005), and a co-founder of here.”>Les Figues Press, publisher of the TrenchArt series of experimental literature. Her work has appeared in Northwest Review, Northridge Review, Film Comment, Contemporary Literary Criticism, 4th Street: A Poetry Bimonthly, LA Weekly Literary Supplement, Five Fingers Review, Greetings #10/11 and The nOulipian Analects. Her nonfiction book about sex-offenders and the morality of guilt will be published by Other Press, and her chapbook, Figure from The Gates of Paradise, has just been released from Woodland Editions.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 15b: Chris Kraus is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Friday, November 3rd at 7pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Chris Kraus is the Los Angeles based author of I Love Dick (1998), Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004) and Torpor (2006), all of which are available from Semiotexte. In 2003 Kraus was cited by the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of the most important new writers to emerge in the past decade. In 1990, she founded the Native Agents new fiction series for Semiotexte, the visionary independent press founded by Sylvere Lotringer at Columbia University in 1972. Kraus writes about art and culture for many international publications including Index, Artext and Art in America. She was nominated for the 2005 Frank Mather Prize in Art Criticism and is presently the Writer in Residence at Colombia College of Art in Chicago.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 15a: Chris Kraus is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Friday, November 3rd at 7pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Chris Kraus is the Los Angeles based author of I Love Dick (1998), Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004) and Torpor (2006), all of which are available from Semiotexte. In 2003 Kraus was cited by the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of the most important new writers to emerge in the past decade. In 1990, she founded the Native Agents new fiction series for Semiotexte, the visionary independent press founded by Sylvere Lotringer at Columbia University in 1972. Kraus writes about art and culture for many international publications including Index, Artext and Art in America. She was nominated for the 2005 Frank Mather Prize in Art Criticism and is presently the Writer in Residence at Colombia College of Art in Chicago.

LA-Lit celebrated its 1 Year Anniversary at Betalevel with a discussion of the experimental literary scene in Los Angeles on Sunday October 15 at 3pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here

Previous guests on the show–Will Alexander, Guy Bennett, Anthony McCann, Amar Ravva, Ara Shirinyan, and Diane Ward–participated in a panel discussion from 3pm-5pm, then gave readings beginning at 7pm.

Topics of discussion included:
LA-Lit – is there one?
Is an identifiable literary community important to Los Angeles?
Have old structures of organization become useless to us?
- rhizomatic communities vs bureaucratic organiztion
What are specific methods that could be used to create/grow literary community?
What role can experimental poetics play in the creation of community?
Eccentric or outside, off-center… is there no center?
How to define our own ‘decentered’ spontaneous connectivity?

For additional consideration, a cloud…

political activism • ecopoetics • urban poetics • art in the context of world-wide brutality • art and activism • the art of protest • collaborative art/poetics • poetic people power • social experiments • the poetics of daily life in an urban setting • momentary poetics • poetic manifestos • postwar culture • the public avant-garde • feminisms • post-avant • activist communities • poetic terrorism • anti-poetics • poetic recreation • textual/poetic extremeties • small poetic world/brutal surrounding world • poetic/activist pleasure • urban nature • a world of cities • cultural activism • street poetics • uncontrollable space of the urban event • community fences/border walls

LA-Lit celebrated its 1 Year Anniversary at Betalevel with a discussion of the experimental literary scene in Los Angeles on Sunday October 15 at 3pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here

Previous guests on the show–Will Alexander, Guy Bennett, Anthony McCann, Amar Ravva, Ara Shirinyan, and Diane Ward–participated in a panel discussion from 3pm-5pm, then gave readings beginning at 7pm.

Topics of discussion included:
LA-Lit – is there one?
Is an identifiable literary community important to Los Angeles?
Have old structures of organization become useless to us?
- rhizomatic communities vs bureaucratic organiztion
What are specific methods that could be used to create/grow literary community?
What role can experimental poetics play in the creation of community?
Eccentric or outside, off-center… is there no center?
How to define our own ‘decentered’ spontaneous connectivity?

For additional consideration, a cloud…

political activism • ecopoetics • urban poetics • art in the context of world-wide brutality • art and activism • the art of protest • collaborative art/poetics • poetic people power • social experiments • the poetics of daily life in an urban setting • momentary poetics • poetic manifestos • postwar culture • the public avant-garde • feminisms • post-avant • activist communities • poetic terrorism • anti-poetics • poetic recreation • textual/poetic extremeties • small poetic world/brutal surrounding world • poetic/activist pleasure • urban nature • a world of cities • cultural activism • street poetics • uncontrollable space of the urban event • community fences/border walls

LA-Lit interviews Mark Wallace
Saturday, February 3 at 3pm
At Betalevel

We’d like to invite you to a live radio recording, reading & conversation this coming Saturday February 3 at 3 p.m. at Betalevel in Chinatown. Mark Wallace will be the featured writer on LA-lit, a radio show co-curated by Mathew Timmons & Stephanie Rioux. The show (& hence the recording) lasts a little over an hour and will be about 30 minutes of reading & about 30 minutes of questions & answers/further questions – alternating between the two modes in hopes of creating a space for dynamic conversation.

For information about attending the recording go here.

Mark Wallace is the author of a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. He is the author of a multi-genre work, Haze, and a novel, Dead Carnival. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) a collection of 26 essays by different writers. Forthcoming in 2007 is a book of short stories, Walking Dreams, and in 2008 a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion. He is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, San Marcos.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 14b: Will Alexander is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, June 25th at 2pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Will Alexander is a poet and visual artist. Working from Los Angeles, he has updated the alchemy of surrealist vision (found in such poets as Aimé Césaire and Raymond Roussel) to write his own cosmic parables, in his own electric incandescent language. His poetic works include Exobiology as Goddess, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (essays), and The Stratospheric Canticles. He has two works forthcoming: a novella, Alien Weaving, from Green Integer; and a book of poems, Sri Lankan Loxodrome, from Canopic Publishing. His most recent book, a trilogy of novels, Sunrise and Armageddon, is out from Spuyten Duyvil. The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England named Will Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century, and he was also recognized by the Whiting Foundation for exceptional literary achievement in New York. In 2002 Will received a fellowship for poetry from the California Arts Council.