August LITERARY READINGS AND EVENTS

Intermedia Arts
LITERARY READINGS AND EVENTS
September 2008

Announcement
WRITERS OF COLOR READING SERIES: EXCITING CHANGES ON THE HORIZON!
We are pleased to announce a new era in the Writers of Color Reading Series—after nearly many wonderful years of being welcome guests of our good friends and partners at Patrick’s Cabaret, we have decided to bring the series home—to Intermedia Arts! At a very special reading on May 8 we said THANK YOU to the wonderful space Patrick’s Cabaret has housed us in for so long, and farewell to curator Sun Yung Shin, who will be retuning to full-time teaching in the fall.

The Writer’s of Color Reading Series will celebrate its re-launch at Intermedia Arts as Beyond the Pure: Readings by Writers of Color at 7PM on Thursday, October 8th, 2008 with co-curators CAROLYN HOLBROOK and JULIE BATES.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series, presented by Intermedia Arts, celebrates the rich diversity of voices that make up the Twin Cities community of writers, readers, and their audiences, offering public readings by both emerging and established local writers and poets. Funds for this activity are provided by the COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is sponsored in part by The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, DreamHaven Books, Patrick’s Cabaret, SF Minnesota, and the University Club of Saint Paul.

For more information, call 612-871-4444 or visit www.intermediaarts.org.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series
Readings at Banfill-Locke
Friday, September 11, 2008
7:30 PM at Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts
6666 E River Rd, Fridley
Hosted by Anna George Meek
Free
Featuring:
CARRIE GAGNE is a junior at Hamline University and a recipient of the 2005 National Council of Teachers of English Writing Achievement Awards. Along with Andrew Warnes, she is co-president of the Broke Starving Writers, Hamline’s creative writing organization. She is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing. In her spare time, she likes to pretend to write well while dreaming of grad school in New York.

CAROLYN HOLBROOK is a writer, educator, and long-time advocate for the healing power of the arts. Her passion for providing grassroots accessibility to the literary arts inspired her to found SASE: The Write Place, a community-based organization for writers. She served as Artistic/Executive Director from 1993-2005 and spearheaded the organization’s successful merger with Intermedia Arts in 2006. Holbrook’s personal essays have been published widely, most recently in White Teachers/Diverse Classrooms (Landsman/Lewis, Stylus Press 2006), Teachers as Collaborative Partners (Tutwiler, Erlbaum Press 2005), Speakeasy (Loft Literary Center 2005) and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire (New York University April 2008). A chapter from her memoir-in-progress inspired a choral piece composed and performed by the Twin Cities Women’s Choir in 2004. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Hamline University and Nonprofit Management at Walden University. She is a long time administrator of Twin Cities literary arts programs. She serves on the board of MN Literature and the program committee of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature for whom she established an artists-in-the-schools program in 2005.

ANDREW WARNES is a junior at Hamline University, where he is the Co-President of the Hamline University Broke Starving Writers. He is an English-Philosophy double major and a communications Minor. He enjoys reading and sculpting.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series, presented by Intermedia Arts, celebrates the rich diversity of voices that make up the Twin Cities community of writers, readers, and their audiences, offering public readings by both emerging and established local writers and poets. Funds for this activity are provided by the COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is sponsored in part by The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, DreamHaven Books, Patrick’s Cabaret, SF Minnesota, and the University Club of Saint Paul.

For more information, call 612-871-4444 or visit www.intermediaarts.org.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series
Readings by Writers
Tuesday, September 15, 2008
7:30 PM at the historic University Club of St Paul
420 Summit Ave, St Paul
Hosted by Carol Connolly
Free and open to the public
Featuring:
ALLISON BROEREN is the co-Slam Master of SlamMN! Beyond poetry, she performs around the Cities with the Rockstar Storytellers, in the MN Fringe Festival, and moonlights coaching a local high school speech team.

SAM COOK initially worked as a poet’s assistant. During the ink crisis of 1999, he was given his first opportunity to shine, displaying his genius for delivering all the punch using only a fraction of the words. Since then, his hard work has officially earned him the title of Poet.

DAVE CRADY better known as “Wonder Dave” is a writer and performer who has made the Twin Cities his home for the past eight years. This marks his second year representing Minnesota at the National Poetry Slam. Dave was recently and pleasantly surprised to learn that, if you google the name “Wonder Dave”, www.myspace.com/wdpoetry is the number one website to come up.

CYNTHIA FRENCH will be making her eighth appearance at the National Poetry Slam. Beyond writing and performing, Cynthia teaches creative writing and performance in area schools and community centers. She skates with the Minnesota Roller Girls roller derby team the Dagger Dolls. She wishes the fortune cookies would give her the right Powerball numbers so she could do poetry full-time.

TOM REED made his official performance debut at age six writing and starring in The Lone Ranger Meets Sleeping Beauty, a collaboration that resulted after Tom and the only other first grader in theatre class couldn’t agree on one fictional world to bring to life for an audience of three. In addition to slam poetry, Tom has appeared on the stage in musicals, competitive forensics, satirical storytelling, choirs, and improvisational theatre. Tom can be seen regularly around the twin cities at several improv venues and poetry slams. His e-mail is TomReedv.1.0@gmail.com.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series, presented by Intermedia Arts, celebrates the rich diversity of voices that make up the Twin Cities community of writers, readers, and their audiences, offering public readings by both emerging and established local writers and poets. Funds for this activity are provided by the COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is sponsored in part by The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, DreamHaven Books, Patrick’s Cabaret, SF Minnesota, and the University Club of Saint Paul.

For more information, call 612-871-4444 or visit www.intermediaarts.org.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series
GLBT Reading Series
Wednesday, September 23, 2008
7:00 PM at Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis
Hosted by John Medeiros and Andrea Jenkins
Free
Featuring:
REBECCA FROST. Can a bi-girl who is (happily) married to a het guy (for a really long time) still be a bi-girl? You betcha. Rebecca Frost is used to crossing supposed lines for good reasons, and continued to do so right up through her recent graduation with an MFA in Writing from Hamline University, as she kept her feet planted in several genres at once. Now, fully commenced, Rebecca remains committed to straddling lines, and standing up for our full, juicy, embodied, genius selves! Her thesis novel, Love, House, brings together eclectic characters who find home in an elegant, ramshackle queer household in Powderhorn neighborhood. Her poems have been published in Grounds for Peace, Close to the Ground, Currents, two mnartists What Light contests, and Writers Rising Up: an online journal, as well as a prizewinning broadside. A veteran performer, Rebecca teaches writers to overcome fears of reading (and doing anything else) in public. FFI contact her via www.embodiedarts.com

MELANIE HOFFERT grew up on a small grain farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She graduated in 2008 with her MFA in creative non-fiction from Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her essay, Going Home, won the 2006 Creative Non-Fiction award by the Baltimore Review where it was also published. Additionally, the chapter, The Allure of Grain Trucks was selected as a 2008 Finalist for the Writers at Work Fellowship Competition. She is currently finishing her first book entitled, The Silent Land: A Memoir about God, Gays, and Good North Dakotans, which recently received Hamline’s Outstanding Thesis Award. The Silent Land explores what it means to be part of the last generation to leave the land, the gravel roads, Lutheran churches, and open fields behind. Through an exploration of the metaphorical parallels between the people of the prairie and the rural landscape, the book is also a meditation on the deep beauty and pain of silence.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series, presented by Intermedia Arts, celebrates the rich diversity of voices that make up the Twin Cities community of writers, readers, and their audiences, offering public readings by both emerging and established local writers and poets. Funds for this activity are provided by the COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is sponsored in part by The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, DreamHaven Books, Patrick’s Cabaret, SF Minnesota, and the University Club of Saint Paul.

For more information, call 612-871-4444 or visit www.intermediaarts.org.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series
Speculations
Monday, September 28, 2008
6:30 PM at DreamHaven Books
912 W Lake St, Minneapolis
Hosted by Eric Heideman
Free
Featuring:
MICHAEL MERRIAM has sold science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction to a variety of magazines, including Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Fictitious Force, and From the Asylum. He has been nominated for the James B. Baker Award, the Preditors and Editors Reader’s Choice Award, and received an Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest in 2007.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series, presented by Intermedia Arts, celebrates the rich diversity of voices that make up the Twin Cities community of writers, readers, and their audiences, offering public readings by both emerging and established local writers and poets. Funds for this activity are provided by the COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is sponsored in part by The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, DreamHaven Books, Patrick’s Cabaret, SF Minnesota, and the University Club of Saint Paul.

For more information, call 612-871-4444 or visit www.intermediaarts.org.

ABOUT THE CAROL CONNOLLY READING SERIES
The Carol Connolly Reading Series is Minnesota’s first and only ongoing series of public literary readings whose mission it is to provide a platform for writers historically excluded from traditional literary settings. It is vital that communities facing inequality of economic resources and under-representation in the arts have a place where their voices can be heard; where their stories can be told. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is that place in the Twin Cities’ literary community.

Each month, The Carol Connolly Reading Series, creates a safe space for GLBT writers and audiences to explore the day-to-day material of life without internal or external censorship; we allow writers of color to come together in celebration and support of one another; we re-define “literary art” by embracing genre writers in our Speculations reading; we provide powerful literary experiences to people with limited geographic access to the arts, and we build and strengthen the ties between all of these communities by not only linking them to one another, but also to the mainstream, traditional literary reading we hold at the University Club in Saint Paul, promoting broad cross-cultural communication and understanding among artists, audiences, neighborhoods and communities.

ABOUT INTERMEDIA ARTS
Intermedia Arts is Minnesota’s premier multidisciplinary, multicultural arts organization. We engage the power of the arts to increase connections and build community between people from different social, economic and ethnic groups. Our mission is to be a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art. Our arts programs inspire people to make changes in their lives and communities. By stimulating broader civic dialogue and by giving voice to the issues and experiences of underrepresented communities, we contribute to a stronger, healthier society.

Intermedia Arts is a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art.
Create. Engage. Inspire. Change.
www.intermediaarts.org