Literary Tailgate! 2013

Sep 22, 2013

For more information, tickets, updates, and draft results, check out the event page: http://literarytailgate.splashthat.com/

On Sunday, September 22 from 7 pm-10 pm, MAKE and Wakefield Media/Uncubed present an Official Brookyn Book Festival Bookend event, the 2nd Annual Literary Tailgate—a SpArts mash-up combining football and literature at the Brooklyn Brewery.

Two teams of writers will compete to gain yards and score touchdowns with their original work. The referee, poet Matthew Rohrer, will determine if the player wins or loses yards, based on criteria invented on the spot: a player might lose ten yards for referencing vampires in a poem. Or gain ten yards for explaining how Dennis Miller came to be an NFL commentator.

The growing roster includes Dorothea Lasky, Guy Cimbalo, Amy Shearn, Stephen Elliott, Christopher Stackhouse, Sarah Jean Alexander, and Damian Lanigan.

The $15 cover includes Brooklyn Brewery beer and Williamsburg Pizza slices (while supplies last)! And, of course, readings from New York’s finest writers.

Presented by Williamsburg Pizza and the Brooklyn Brewery, in cooperation with the Brooklyn Book Festival. http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/

And by Literary Partners A Public Space, CLMP, Ugly Duckling Press, Wave Books, The American, McSweeney’s, and Publishing Genius.

In addition to our wonderful sponsors and literary partners, the following businesses have contributed merchandise and gift certificates to the Booster Club raffle: Beer Street, Nitehawk Cinema, Root Hill Cafe, and Three Letters Restaurant.

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THE ROSTER

o Sarah Jean Alexander
o CORNERBACK
o Sarah Jean Alexander edits Parlor, an online magazine for exquisite corpse poetry. She is the poetry editor of Shabby Doll House and has work published at Hobart,Spork, Pangur Ban Party, Thought Catalog,Pop Serial, Keep This Bag Away From Children, and HOUSEFIRE. Sarah Jean lives in Brooklyn with her orange cat.

o Guy Cimbalo
o DEFENSIVE LINEMAN
o Guy Cimbalo is the editor of Wakefield, a resource for and about the startup world. His writing has appeared in Playboy, Maxim,BlackBook, and elsewhere.

Mira Gonzalez
OFFENSIVE TACKLE
Mira Gonzalez [b. 1992] is from Los Angeles, California. She is the author of I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together (Sorry House, 2012). She is widely published in print and online at Thought Catalog, Muumuu House, Metazen, Pop Serial and others.

o Stephen Elliott
o NOSE TACKLE
o Stephen Elliott is the the author of seven books includingthe novel Happy Baby(Picador, 2004) and The Adderall Diaries(Graywolf Press, 2010). His writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, The Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is also the founding editor of the popular online literary magazine The Rumpus.

o Damian Lanigan
o WIDE RECEIVER
o Damian Lanigan is a British writer. He has written two novels – Stretch 29(HarperCollins, 2000) and The Chancers(HarperCollins, 2004).He is the writer and series creator of BBC Three sitcom “Massive.” He wrote the play Dissonance, which debuted at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2007 before being premiered in New York at the Bay Street Theater, Sag Harbor in 2010.

o Dorothea Lasky
o RUNNING BACK
o Dorothea Lasky was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published three collections of poetry,AWE (2007), and Black Life (2010), andThunderbird (2012), as well as several chapbooks, including the polemical Poetry Is Not a Project (2010). Her poems have appeared in a number of prominent publications, including the New Yorker,Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Lasky was awarded a Bagley Wright Fellowship in 2013, and she is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University.

o Matthew Rohrer
o REFEREE
o In 1970, Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in Oklahoma. He earned a BA from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from the University of Iowa. He’s received the Hopwood Award for poetry and a Pushcart prize; he was selected as a National Poetry Series winner and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He has participated in residencies/performances at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, 2009) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York City, 2010). Rohrer’s poetry collections include A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009) andDestroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011). His poems are known for their surreal imagery, imagination, and sharp humor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at New York University.

o Amy Shearn
o QUARTERBACK
Amy Shearn was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1979. She studied in New Mexico, Chicago, and Iowa, before receiving her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of How Far Is the Ocean from Here (Crown Books, 2008) and The Mermaid of Brooklyn (Touchstone, 2013). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, The Millions, Poets & Writers, TheL Magazine, Opium, Five Chapters, and elsewhere. She writes regularly for Oprah.com and RedbookMag.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

o Christopher Stackhouse
o SAFETY
o Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, curator, and visual artist. He is the author of Plural(Counterpath, 2012), Slip (Corollary Press, 2005) and is the co-author of an image/text collaboration with writer and translator John Keene, Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), which features Stackhouse’s drawings in philosophical discourse with Keene’s texts. Fellowships and awards include Cave Canem Writer Fellow (1997, 1999, 2003); Fellow in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts (2005); Pocantico Residency at the Marcel Breuer House, Rockefeller Brothers Fund For The Arts (2009). He is an advisory board member at Fence Magazine, a contributing editor at Bomb Magazine, and a contributing poetry editor at Vanitas Magazine.