past events

June 3 Reginald Gibbons Book Release Party at STOP SMILING Storefront, 1371 N. Milwaukee Avenue

Celebrate the release of this award-winning Chicago author’s collection of Chicago poems and stories, SLOW TRAIN OVERHEAD. Gibbons will be joined by gapersblock.com’s Politics Editor, Ramsin Canon. Canon will present a multi-media “Chicago Ward Primer: Celebrities, Scandals & Snacks”

Complimentary beer!

Complimentary appetizers from Las Palmas!

About the author: “Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet’s eye, and capture what it’s really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O’Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child’s piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city’s people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.” – University of Chicago Press

FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE

April 2, Iowa City, Iowa

Cocktail Hour Reading at the Motley Cow
as part of the Mission Creek Festival and featuring poets Joel Craig, Rob Schlegel, & Nick Twemlow, as well as writers Fred Sasaki and Kathryn Scanlan

For more info click here.

Go to Facebook event page.

April 9, Denver, CO

AWP Off-Site Event

MAKE it ANOTHER Afterparty

Friday, April 9
Doors at 8:00 pm
Performances begin at 9:00 pm

(Secret) Gallery
901 W 7TH AVE
DENVER CO 80204

Featuring short, salon-style presentations/readings/ceremony and loot from
ACM, Artifice Magazine, Canarium Books, Green Lantern Press, featherproof, MAKE, Rose Metal Press, Hobart, knee-jerk, and the 2nd Hand.

Go to Facebook Event Page.

MAKE ISSUE 9 Release Party at the HIDEOUT, 1354 W. Wabansia

MARCH 18, 8pm

Featuring readings from contributors, Paul Cary, Death Ships, DJ Joel Craig and much more!!

| 12.5.09: A Saturday Evening Pre: Cocktail Hour at Bar Deville Stephen Elliott, Luis Alberto Urrea and Caroline Picard – hosted by Jonathan Messinger;