Join us for the book launch of Hot Jewels, Chuck Kinder’s second collection of poetry on Six Gallery Press, and a celebration of the author’s life and work. Chuck will be here via Skype, with other poets taking the Alphabet City stage for a series of live poetry readings.
Other Featured Writers:
Scott Silsbe
Michael Simms
Lori Jakiela
Sharon Fagan McDermott
Dave Newman
Micki Myers
Toi Derricotte
Chuck Kinder is the author of four novels—Snakehunter, The Silver Ghost, Honeymooners, and Last Mountain Dancer—and three collections of poetry—Imagination Motel, All That Yellow, and Hot Jewels.
Kinder was born and raised in West Virginia. He received a BA and MA in English from West Virginia University, where he wrote the first creative writing thesis in school history, which evolved into his first novel, Snakehunter. He later caught a Greyhound and headed west to join friends living in San Francisco.
In 1971 Kinder was awarded the Edith Mirrielees Writing Fellowship to Stanford University, followed by the Jones Lectureship in Fiction Writing. He has been a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Davis, and at the University of Alabama, and he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and Yaddo’s Dorothy and Granville Hicks Fellowship.
At Stanford, Kinder became close friends with fellow students Raymond Carver, Scott Turow, and Larry McMurtry. His relationship with Carver inspired Honeymooners. His struggle to complete this book inspired the character Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.
As a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh for more than three decades, Kinder served as the director of the creative writing program and helped foster the careers of Michael Chabon, Earl H. McDaniel, Chuck Rosenthal, Gretchen Moran Laskas, and Keely Bowers.
He now lives in Key Largo, Florida, with Diane Cecily, his wife of over forty years.
Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private high school in Pittsburgh. She has published three chapbook collections, most recently, Bitter Acoustic, winner of the 2011 Jacar Press Chapbook competition. McDermott has been a recipient of both a Pittsburgh Foundation Award and a PA Council on the Arts grant. Her poems have been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Seneca Review, and the anthology Common Wealth: Poets on Pennsylvania. Her book Life Without Furniture (Jacar Press NC) is forthcoming in May 2018.
Lori Jakiela is the author of five books, most recently the memoir BELIEF IS ITS OWN KIND OF TRUTH, MAYBE (Atticus Books), which received the William Saroyan Prize for International Writing from Stanford University, and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A BINGO WORKER (Bottom Dog Press), a collection of essays about work and the writing life. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. She received the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh Prize, a Golden Quill Award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, fellowships to the Breadloaf and Bennington writers conferences, and more. She directs the undergraduate Creative and Professional Writing Program at Pitt-Greensburg, where she is a professor of English. She teaches community workshops at The Yoga Deck in her hometown, Trafford, PA, and founded and co-directs Veterans Write, a program that offers free writing workshops to veterans and those who love them. Her sixth book — HOW DO YOU LIKE IT NOW, GENTLEMEN? — is a poetry collection forthcoming from Low Ghost Press in 2019. She lives in Trafford, PA with her husband/author Dave Newman and their children. Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net. Chuck Kinder taught her to box and be kind, not necessarily in that order. She is forever grateful to him.
Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit and now lives in Pittsburgh. His poems and prose have appeared in a number of fine periodicals including Kitchen Sink, Third Coast, The Chariton Review, Nerve Cowboy, Words Dance, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Six Gallery Press published his first full-length collection of poems Unattended Fire in 2012 and Low Ghost Press published The River Underneath the City in 2013.
Michael Simms has been active in politics and poetry for over 40 years as a writer, teacher, editor, and community activist. He’s the founder and editor of Vox Populi, an online “gazette of the left” and he’s the founder of Autumn House Press, a nonprofit publisher of books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He’s also the author of four collections of poetry and a college textbook about poetry — and the lead editor of over 100 published books. Simms has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Certificate in Plant-based Nutrition from Cornell University. He lives with his wife, Eva in the historic Mount Washington neighborhood overlooking Pittsburgh.
Dave Newman is the author of six books, including Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (Broken River Books, forthcoming 2018), the novella Sammy Drinks Canned Beer (White Gorilla Press, forthcoming 2018), The Poem Factory (White Gorilla Press, 2015), the novels Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (Writers Tribe Books, 2012) and Two Small Birds (Writers Tribe Books, 2014), and the collection The Slaughterhouse Poems (White Gorilla Press, 2013), named one of the best books of the year by L Magazine. He lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela, and their two children. He works in medical research, serving elders.
Micki Myers is the author of two books of poetry, Trigger Finger, and It’s Probably Nothing…, and her work has appeared widely in print and online. She is the author of the blog Yuckylicious and is currently co-writing and editing a series of children’s books that incorporate virtual reality. Micki teaches English and lives in Squirrel Hill.
Toi Derricotte has published five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Undertaker’s Daughter. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, received the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is a recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and two Pushcart Prizes, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996. She has served on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.
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