Write On
June 11, 2012 at 8pm
David Mills host WRITE ON (An evening of Poetry and more Poetry) featuring Kim Coleman Foote, Ilka Scobie, Norman Stock, Jeff Wright, and Phyllis Wat.
David Mills
David Mills has a master’s in creative writingfrom New York Universityand is a cum laude grad of Yale University. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, Jubilat, Callaloo, Rattapallax, Aloud Poets from the Nuyorican Café, Harvard University’s Transition Magazine, Obsidian III, Brooklyn Railand Hanging Loose Press to name a few. He is a 2010 Queens Poet LaureateFinalist. His collection the Dream Detective is a small press bestseller. He has won NYFA, Breadloaf, Henry James, Brio (Bronx Recognize’s Its Own), PALF( Ghana ’s Pan-African Literary Forum), Hughes/Diop and Soros Fellowships to travel to Poland to write poems about the Holocaust. He has also recorded his poetry on RCA records with jazz artist Steve Coleman. Working with a jazz band, he opened for Chick Corea and David Sanborn at the Vienna Jazz Festival performing his poetry. He was featured on the PBS documentary “Slammin.”. He has written book reviews for the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Rolling Stone. He also lived as writer-in-residence in Harlem Renaissance luminary Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home. His poems have been displayed at the Venice Biennale and the German Documenta art exhibitions. He was an audition writer for Sesame Street. The Julliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play written by David Mills. Urban Stages commissioned Mr. Mills to write a play about the life of Frederick Douglass. He was commissioned to write the narration for an Italian dance theater piece—the Tarantella.
Kim Coleman Foote
Kim Coleman Foote is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Obsidian, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere. Honors include the Rona Jaffe Foundation/Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Pan African Literary Forum Africana Creative Nonfiction Award, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for prose. She has also been awarded residencies with VCCA and Hedgebrook and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University. She is currently working on an African-female-centered novel about the slave trade in 18th-century Ghana, where she was a Fulbright Fellow.
Ilka Scobie
Ilka Scobie is a poet who teaches in the NYC school system. Her recent work appears in LiveMag, Vanitas, Poetry in Performance, Italian Marie Claire and artnet.
Norman Stock
Norman Stock is the author of two books of poetry: Buying Breakfast For My Kamikaze Pilot (Gibbs Smith,1994), winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Contest, and Pickled Dreams Naked (NYQ Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, College English, The New York Quarterly, The New England Review, Denver Quarterly, Verse, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies and textbooks. The recipient of awards from the Writer’s Voice, Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, the Bennington Writing Workshops, and the Tanne Foundation, he has also been a Bread Loaf fellow, a Sewanee scholar, and a finalist for Poet Laureate of Queens. Formerly the Acquisitions Librarian at Montclair State University, from which he retired in 2005, he lives with his wife, Lydia Chang, a clinical psychotherapist, in Jackson Heights New York.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is best known as a poet and author of 11 books. Most recently his collection of sonnets called Triple Crown has been accepted by Spuyten Duyvil Press. He is also an impresario, musician, artist and eco-activist. He recently had a show at Tribes Gallery and curated another at AC Institute in Chelsea. He hosts monthly parties in the East Village’s Dias y Flores Community Garden. A long-time publisher as well, he produces Live Mag! www.livemagnyc.com
Phyllis Wat
Phyllis Wat’s most recent poetry is out in Ping Pong Magazine. She has three books in print — “Shadow Blue” from Hot Water; “The Fish Soup Bowl Expedition” from Ten Pell Books; and “The Influence of Paintings Hung in Bedrooms” from United Artists. She is an editor of the online magazine Press 1 which comes out three times a year, and is the publisher of Straw Gate Books.