Date: Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014,
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Union Square Barnes & Noble, 33 East 17th Street, New York, NY 10003.
Please join us for the 2014-15 12th Street Journal Online launch, with an evening of readings by Alysia Abbott, Jeffery Allen, and Marisa Frasca, along with student contributors to 12thstreetonline.com from the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy, of the Writing Program at the New School.
Alysia Abbott is a memoirist, essayist and journalist. She is the author of the memoir, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner. She has also been published in The New York Times, Slate, and TheAtlantic.com, among other publications. Abbott grew up in San Francisco, and received her MFA in writing from the New School Writing Program. She now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family, where she co-created and runs the website TheRecollectors.com , “a storytelling site and community for the many children and families left behind by parents who died of AIDS.”
Words on Abbott: “At once a father-daughter love story, a testament to survival, a meditation on profound loss, and a searing chronicle of a complex coming of age, Fairyland is a beautiful, haunting book that instructs, even as it breaks our hearts.” – Dani Shapiro, author
Jeffery Renard Allen is a poet, essayist, short-story-writer and novelist. He is the author of the novel, Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction; the story collection, Holding Pattern, and two collections of poetry. He has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and Bomb, among numerous other publications. His writing was also included in the 2010 edition of Best African American Fiction. He was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in New York City, where he teaches at Queens College and in the Writing Program at the New School.
Words on Allen: “Constructed like a mosaic…Allen’s prose is intense, concentrated. His language, which ranges from the delicately lyrical to the aggressively vulgar, demonstrates extraordinary poise… There is also some preaching from a church pulpit that, if read aloud, would stand a good chance of bringing the house down.”–Stephen Donadio, The New York Times Book Review
Marisa Frasca‘s most recently released collection of poems, Via Incanto: Poems from the Darkroom, was named first runner-up for the 2013 National Bordighera Poetry Prize. She has had her poems published in journals and anthologies, such as: Voices in Italian Americana, 5 AM, Arba Sicula, Philadelphia Poets, and Adanna Journal, among many others. Frasca was born in Vittoria, Italy, and moved to New York City where she earned her BA at The New School and was a Riggio Writing Honors student. She holds an MFA in poetry from Drew University. She now lives in the New York Metro and Long Island area.
Words on Frasca: “”Frasca’s vision and passion are so arrived, so rich with variation, that they elevate us inside a lyric adventure…her darkroom—part time-capsule, part temple—steals everything. It tests the heart with fire and compression, and it tests all of us with razor-sharp memory.”–Judith Vollmer, poet