Hello, local literati and patrons of the arts!
The Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions series is on hiatus for the summer. Please join us again in August for weekly indulgences in art and literature. Check this site for updates, or join us on Facebook.
Interested in reading your writing or sharing your art in the fall? Contact us at orr.series@gmail.com.
Please stop by Orr Street Studios to meet the artists. The studios are open 12-3 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, by appointment, and for special events. Visit 6-9 p.m. July 20 for Artrageous Friday.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Hearing Voices with Jessie Adolph and Evelyn Somers
Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7:30 p.m.* Tuesday, April 24, for readings of fiction by Evelyn Somers and poetry by Jessie Adolph.
*Note the later start time.
JESSIE ADOLPH
Please join us before the reading for a performance, reading and reception with visiting poet Toi Derricotte, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Berlin Theatre. The theater is located inside Cafe Berlin at 220 North 10th St., one block from Orr Street Studios.
JESSIE ADOLPH
Jessie Adolph earned a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in Africana Studies from Central Missouri State University, where he participated in the McNair Scholarship program. His undergraduate thesis, "Bronzeville: The Chicago Renaissance," was presented at two research conferences, and he was invited to participate in the SREB: Compact for Minority Scholars and Future Faculty Members. At the national Black Graduate Student Conference he presented the paper "Sankofic Rememorization," which examines how hip-hop poets utilize motifs from slave and postslavery oral traditions to reverse the western gaze of othering.
He earned the Kenneth Davis Folklore Award for his essay "The Influence of Black Sermonic Discourse on Black Arts Movement and the Hip-hop Generation."
Adolph has performed original spoken-word poetry at events such as the Missouri Black Expo, and his poetry has appeared in publications including Spokenvizions magazine. He recently wrote the afterword to internationally known poet Jessica Care Moore's latest book, "God Is Not An American."
After a year of teaching in a Columbia public high school, Adolph is returning to his role as a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where he has taught freshmen composition using hip-hop culture.
Evelyn Somers’s fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Crazyhorse, Many Mountains Moving, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Georgia Review and Pank and is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and Cedars.
She has been associate editor of The Missouri Review for more than 20 years.
Books she has edited as a freelancer have won the John Simmons award for short fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Peter Taylor prize for the novel and have been published by both university presses, small presses larger, commercial houses in the United States and abroad.
Somers received a Barbara Deming Foundation grant for her first novel, Preacher’s House, for which she is seeking a publisher. A second novel is in progress.
She has been associate editor of The Missouri Review for more than 20 years.
Books she has edited as a freelancer have won the John Simmons award for short fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Peter Taylor prize for the novel and have been published by both university presses, small presses larger, commercial houses in the United States and abroad.
Somers received a Barbara Deming Foundation grant for her first novel, Preacher’s House, for which she is seeking a publisher. A second novel is in progress.
She recently completed a collection of sometimes eccentric, sometimes feminist stories.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Hearing Voices with Rachel Patterson and Tori Redmond
Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, for readings of poetry by Rachel Patterson and fiction by Tori Redmond.
RACHEL PATTERSON
Tori Redmond is a writer living in Dixon, Missouri. Tucked away in acres of dense forest, she tends to steer clear of social settings in favor of more spiritual pursuits. Currently working on her first novel: In The Company of Dogs. She is still working in the soul-sucking world of marketing, but she hopes to engage in more creative pursuits this year and beyond. Her poetry has pretty much appeared crumpled up in corners of her house at this point, but several of her feminist, religious and body-positive rants have been shared far and wide on the 'net.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Hearing Voices with Anand Prahlad
Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 13, for readings of poetry and prose by Anand Prahlad.
Prahlad is a poet, scholar, educator, musician, songwriter and author of creative non-fiction. His poetry has been published widely in literary journals, and he is the author of two books of poems: Hear My Story and Other Poems and, most recently, As Good as Mango, which was published in February 2012. He has completed another manuscript of poems, Incarnation, and is working on a memoir, titled Getting Happy, Memoir of an African American Autistic.
Prahlad's scholarly publications include Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music, African American Proverbs in Context and the three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. Prahlad teaches folklore, film and poetry in the English Department at the University of Missouri, where he has been honored with the 2009 Faculty-Alumni Award, the 2010 Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence and inclusion in Nerds of Mizzou.
MEMOIR Getting Happy: a Memoir of an African American Autistic takes the reader into the world of an African American child with Asperger's syndrome growing up in the 1950s-1970s on a plantation in middle Virginia. Written in a poetic, experimental form, the narrative follows the author as he makes his way through childhood in a rural segregated community, attends college in Virginia and graduate school in California, joins New Age communities such as the Bhagwan Rajneesh spiritual movement, enters the worlds of parenthood and marriage, and becomes a university professor. The main focuses of the memoir are the interior and sensory perceptions of the author and his struggle to make sense of -- and function in -- the neurologically typical world.
Photos by Shane Epping
POETRY
As Good as Mango is a journey told in the sensual language of blues and jazz. It moves from the landscape of colonial Africa into the colonial American South, and into the present. The hauntings of the past come alive with echoes of unclaimed history. The poems in this collection simultaneously affirm and inspect black identity — and identity in general. These are the poems of the bitter/sweet taste on the tongues of exiles searching for home.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Hearing Voices with Alex George and Tony Mena
Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb 28, for readings of fiction by Alex George and poetry by Tony Mena.
Alex George is a writer and a lawyer. He was born in England but presently lives in Columbia, Missouri.
Alex has been named as one of Britain's top ten "thirtysomething" novelists by the Times of London, and was also named the Independent on Sunday's "face to watch" for fiction in its Fresh Talent feature.
His most recent novel, A Good American, was published by Penguin Books in February and has received rave reviews.
Alex studied law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He moved to the United States in 2003, and re-qualified as a US attorney. He now runs his own law firm in Columbia.
He is proud to be president of the board of the Voluntary Action Center, a leading nonprofit organization in mid-Missouri.
Alex has two young children. His hobbies include listening to obscure jazz albums, playing his saxophone and cooking (and eating) complicated meals.
He is now hard at work on his new novel.
Alex has been named as one of Britain's top ten "thirtysomething" novelists by the Times of London, and was also named the Independent on Sunday's "face to watch" for fiction in its Fresh Talent feature.
His most recent novel, A Good American, was published by Penguin Books in February and has received rave reviews.
Alex studied law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He moved to the United States in 2003, and re-qualified as a US attorney. He now runs his own law firm in Columbia.
He is proud to be president of the board of the Voluntary Action Center, a leading nonprofit organization in mid-Missouri.
Alex has two young children. His hobbies include listening to obscure jazz albums, playing his saxophone and cooking (and eating) complicated meals.
He is now hard at work on his new novel.
TONY MENA
Gerardo "Tony" Mena is a decorated Iraqi Freedom veteran who spent six years in the Special Operations community with the Reconnaissance Marines as a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman (SARC). During his tour in Iraq he was awarded a Navy Achievement Medal with a V for Valor for multiple acts of bravery.
He is currently a wrestling coach at Hickman High School and is studying at MU to be a high school English teacher. He was awarded the 2011 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Leadership, as well as the 2011 U.S. Bank/Mizzou Student Veterans Association Scholarship.
His poem, "So I Was a Coffin," was the winner of the "2010 War Poetry Contest" sponsored by Winningwriters, and his multimedia version was featured in the online portion of Poets & Writers Magazine. He was selected for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2011 anthology series featuring fifty poems from promising emerging poets. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as a "Best of the Net 2011" award. He won the "2011 Penumbra Haiku Contest" sponsored by the Tallahassee Writers Association. He has poems published in Diagram, Burner Magazine, The Medulla Review, Barely South Review, Spillway, The San Pedro River Review, Sleetmagazine, Protest Poems.org, The New Mexico Poetry Review, a non-fiction essay published on the Veterans Association's website, two songs featured in the Nashville Review, and a third song featured in The Blue Lotus Review.
He has poems and essays forthcoming from Raleigh Review, Prairie Schooner Digital Online Project, Chautaqua, Cider Press Review, Hawai'i Review and War, Literature and the Arts. He has just completed his first full-length manuscript of war poetry.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Hearing Voices with Keija Parssinen and Thom Dawkins
Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb 14, for readings of fiction by Keija Parssinen and poetry by Thom Dawkins.
KEIJA PARSSINEN
Keija Parssinen was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for 12 years as a third-generation expatriate. She earned a degree in English literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching & Writing Fellowship. She lives with her husband on the edge of a quarry in Columbia, Mo., where she directs the Quarry Heights Writers' Workshop and writes at a desk made of 19th-century Missouri barn wood. The Ruins of Us, Parssinen's debut novel, was published in January 2012 by Harper Perennial in North America and Faber & Faber in the U.K., Ireland, Australia and South Africa. It won a Michener-Copernicus award.
THOM DAWKINS
Thom Dawkins serves as the reviews editor for Weave magazine and contributes regularly to the Los Angeles Review. His recent work as a poet and critic has also appeared in Pleiades, New Orleans Review, DMQ Review and Puerto del Sol. He earned an MFA at Chatham University and studied theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Thom lives in Columbia, Mo., where he teaches poetry and composition.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Seeing Visions with Chris Morrey
Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, for an evening with sculptor Chris Morrey.
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| Cat 1, bronze, 2010. By Chris Morrey. |
CHRIS MORREY
Chris Morrey's bronze sculptures combine plant and animal forms into delicate, primeval, humorous and menacing figures that can seem half-glimpsed and elusive even on close inspection. Since completing his MFA in sculpture at the University of Missouri in 2009, Chris has been building public commissions for the university's new student center, the Boone County Hospital and City Hall and has completed a permanent installation at Missouri Valley College in Marshall. He has also opened Dogwood, a low-cost studio space for local artists in downtown Columbia.
See Chris Morrey's work.
Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.
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