January 20th, 2023 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Please join us for a reading and book signing on Friday January 20th, at 7pm at FOUND:RE Contemporary. Match Market and Bar will be open for food, beverages, and a unique shopping experience.
DATE: Friday, January 20
TIME: 7PM to 9:30PM
TICKETS: $15 per person plus tax. Purchase tickets here - https://bit.ly/3vxdyIJ
Five Arizona poets (Andie Francis, Farid Matuk, Sara Sams, Susan Briante, and Valyntina Grenier) will read a selection of their work. All authors will have books available for purchase during the night and will stick around after for autographs. Join us for this inspiring night of poetry! Masks are encouraged for this indoor event.
More info on our featured poets:
"Surreal, madcap, and brilliant all at once, Andie Francis’s creative universe is lit like fireworks. Music and meaning collide, redouble, and dissolve in poems where “great lights give. And great lights light. And great lights light upon.” Welcome to a pyrotechnics of sound and sense, a wonder of imagination, reality, and myth. Francis reminds us that while the world is strange and inexplicable, the world of poetry offers us ways to resist and also to act. As she writes, 'Here, hold out for more.'" —Jane Miller
Andie Francis (she/her) is the author of I Am Trying to Show You My Matchbook Collection (CutBank Books) and A Fresh Start Will Put You On Your Way (Finishing Line Press).
She is a Poetry Editor for Carbon Copy and DIAGRAM. She currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and teaches at Northern Arizona University. andiefrancis.com
“Briante, with such incredible care and generosity, investigates every frame that contains stories of suffering; every platitude that proves our moral certitude. By laying bare these limitations, Briante breaks open possibilities where injustice can be “newly felt." Not only that, she asks how poetry can be a social practice and not just a feat of imagination. Anyone who’s interested in writing about someone other than themselves needs to read this book. Defacing the Monument is a stunning and brilliant intervention on how poetry documents history.” —Cathy Park Hong
Susan Briante is the author of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press 2020), essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. She is a professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. There she heads the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, UtopiaMinus, and The Market Wonders. susanbriante.com | @utopiaminus
“[O]rdinary vision/is a hinge/crowded with flowers.” So begins my (our!) lucky chance to experience the world through Valyntina Grenier’s capacious (and beyond ordinary) vision – a vision that is brilliant in its ability to help us know the world and ourselves through all of our senses (read these lines aloud, feel them slip and clap in your mouth), enlarging the often simplified statement that “People are nature” to include all of the grandeur and violence and banality such a statement can, and must, mean. Grenier has both witnessed and provoked the “trashed lilies” (of my body and the earth) to “punch the air” and I could not be more grateful to be in this company. –TC Tolbert
Valyntina is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022) and Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020). You’ll find her work in, Impermanent Earth, The Impossible Beast: Queer Erotic Poems, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks, Querencia, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, Sunspot, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
"Sara Sams' Atom City opens with a caution, "But Think, Are You Authorized to Tell It." In poems of sharp wit and riveting investigation, tell it she does! Aware of the irony of "grow[ing] up happy / in a town that knitted / mushroom clouds," Sams documents government duplicity and the revisionist history of developing the atomic bomb. The volume is punctuated by poems rich in details of her Appalachian roots and a magnificent series about local legend "Prophet John," who foresaw the bomb a century ago. Exploratory poems from the "vast archive of the atoms" are tempered by tender poems of loss and love. This is a bold debut by a major new poet." —Cynthia Hogue
Sara Sams is a writer and translator from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the University of Arizona’s Creative Writing program. She is a graduate of Davidson College (B.A.) and Arizona State University (M.F.A.) and has received teaching fellowships from the Ministry of Education of Spain and the National University of Singapore. She believes all poetry is an act of translation, a brief she holds fast to in her role as Poetry Editor for Identity Theory. You can find her editorial work at identitytheorymag.com and her creative work at saraesams.com.
Redolent is a handmade, limited-edition artist book comprising twelve prints of paintings by Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez and seven poems by Farid Matuk, designed and produced by Singing Saw Press. The result of a years-long collaboration, the poems and images in Redolent build a vocabulary of beauty and violence, where lush flora and fauna are entangled with symbols of surveillance and militarization and where tender expressions of kinship brush against relations of patriarchy and nationhood.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Their work has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Redolent, their book-arts collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, is now available from Singing Saw Press. Matuk serves as core faculty in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Arizona in Tucson where they live with their partner, the writer Susan Briante. IG@farid_matuk
