Actual Kansas Pictures

Much thanks to Elaine Litzau for her impromptu intro of me at Mike, Karl, and Jim's reading, and for these pictures of said reading:

Mike Hauser, reading from Psychic Headset.

Jim "McCracken" McCrary.

K. Kenneth Saffran.

Farts.

"Buddies."

Friday Night Reading!

Friday / November 7, 2008 / 7pm

6 Gallery

(716.5 Massachusetts Street, Lawrence, KS)

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year. Her second poetry book, The Heaven-Sent Leaf was recently released by BOA Editions, and will be available at the reading.

Katy's poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and State of the Union (Wave Books), among other compilations. She serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine.

Katy is keeping a blog about her current book tour.

Given An Actual Kansas' obsession with tha skrilla/tha cheddah/cash money, this blurb on Katy's new book is appropriate to include here:

. . . Lederer charts her speakers' interior landscapes according to the [New York C]ity's highly monetized geography, viewing life in the big city through the lens of expenditure— not just of money, but of all that money signifies. In poems that are both heartfelt and ruthlessly critical of our current financial milieu, in which the fates of individuals are packaged, priced out, and then bundled for sale on the open market, Lederer proves Robert Graves's famous observation wrong: though there may be no money in poetry, there is indeed poetry in money.

Katy works at "a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan."


Kazim Ali is is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, and The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions 2008). He is also the author of the novel Quinn’s Passage (blazeVox books), named one of Chronogram magazine's Best Books of 2005.

He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. His work has been featured in many national journals such as Best American Poetry 2007, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, jubilat, and Massachusetts Review. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books.

For excerpts and audio, to order books, and for other things Kazim Ali, visit his website.