SPD: Live at the AWP

read what's happening at the AWP bookfair in NYC, as seen by Small Press Distribution's Brent Cunningham & Laura Moriarty as they fight the good fight....

http://awplive.blogspot.com/

Call for Submissions : Digital Artifact Magazine

DIGITAL ARTIFACT MAGAZINE

ISSUE 2: TRANSNATIONALISM

**Call for submissions**

Deadline: May 15, 2008

Digital Artifact Magazine interrogates narrative in contemporary culture through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, and web-based audio-visual work. We're specifically interested in the impact of digital culture and globalization on contemporary narrative(s). How do these phenomena create new forms of story, text, language, and literature? What kinds of narratives have emerged from specific elements such as web sites, chatrooms, video games, Myspace, internet porn, digital photography, web cams, blogs, internet media and cell phones, as well as broad trends such as the breakdown of national boundaries, the increased speed of communication, and the globalization of culture, capitalism, and war?

The second issue of Digital Artifact will examine the idea of transnationalism. What is the transnational space in literature and art? How do we describe the textual and digital interactions between countries, classes, cultures, languages, and identities? How do we write/track border crossings, migrations, translations, trans-cultural identities and conversations? In particular, we are interested in narratives that cross boundaries between the countries of the so-called first, second, and third worlds, narratives of migration, war, global society, cosmopolitanism and refugee culture. What does nationalism mean in our time? What is your (trans)nationality? We invite creative responses that explore these question through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, or web-based audio-visual work. Our aesthetic tendencies are always on display at digitalartifactmagazine.com.

Submission Guidelines

We accept e-mail submissions only. Send submissions to digitalartifact@gmail.com. In the subject heading, include your last name and the word “submission.” Do not send previously published work, and let us know if the work gets accepted elsewhere. One submission per person, please. Include a brief (50-100 word) bio with your work. We will read and respond to submissions between May 15 and July 15. We regret that we cannot provide payment for accepted content at this time.

**We accept text pieces up to 2,000 words in length. Please paste your work as plain text directly into the e-mail. You may also send a text document as an attachment in addition to pasting the content, if formatting is important to the piece.

**For images, we accept visual files in pdf, jpeg, and gif format. Please send low-res (72 dpi) versions for submission review.

**For sound, send mp3 files, zipped if possible, at a length of 5 minutes or less.

**For video footage, email QuickTime files, compressed for web, again in the vicinity of 5 minutes or less. Links to videos posted online also work. If we have difficulty looking at your video due to compatibility issues, we will email you with information about uploading your submission to the Digital Artifact YouTube account.

digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifactmagazine.blogspot.com
digitalartifact@gmail.com

Digital Artifact Magazine reading at ATA : 2.22.08

Reading for Digital Artifact Magazine

Friday, February 22, 2008. 8 PM. $6
Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia St., SF
(415) 824-3890, ata@atasite.org
Wheelchair accessible

Digital Artifact Magazine is a new, web-based journal that explores digital and global culture using hybrid aesthetic tactics. Join us for a reading and screening by contributors from Issue 1 (Summer 2007), as we solicit submissions for Issue 2.

Readings by David Christensen, Soledad De Costa, Camille Roy, Will Skinker, Sarah Fran Wisby. Screenings by Faye Driscoll, Kara Hearn, Jessica Lawless, Julianna Mundim, Kirthi Nath, Katina Papson, Sherri Wood.

digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifactmagazine.blogspot.com
digitalartifactmagazine@gmail.com

we're getting the band back together!

Great news everybody! Artifact will be back in action beginning in March!

Thanks to Kaya Oakes recommendation (yay Kaya), I've just met with the wonderful peeps over at OAKLAND ART GALLERY & they are very excited to have us. It's a great space in downtown Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza (near 12th St. BART & Van Cleef's!). They've currently got a lovely show of painters Mike Henderson & Amy Kaufman. Go see.

We are terribly thrilled to be starting up the series again. It's been lonely without you.

More news to come as it unfolds...

Martian Poetics Class with Laura Moriarty & Brent Cunningham

MARTIAN POETICS: A CLASS

Led By

Laura Moriarty (Author of Ultravioleta & 13 other books)

&

Brent Cunningham (Author of Bird & Forest)

TEN (10) CLASSES for $200
Meets Every Wednesday from 6:30pm-9pm
starting March 5th, 2008 ***Note date change***
Class meets at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley
1341 Seventh Street

SIGN UP NOW (Pay Pal & most credit cards accepted):

CLASS DESCRIPTION: It's easy to forget how strange poetry is. Whether it's messages from martians, value for the ecstatic (from greek ekstasis, "to be or stand outside oneself"), or frankensteinian borrowings from areas generally believed to be "other" to poetry (science, philosophy, history, logic), we believe this shifty something else to be at the heart of why poetry interests us in the first place. We will look at some of the ways communities of poets have and might cultivate this something else rather than try to dispel or contain it. We will talk about the ways it shows up in scenes, aesthetic principles, and most often specific poems. We will take dispassionate looks at ekstasis, and ecstatic looks at dispassion. We will often write during class. There will be no workshopping, but for interested students there will be opportunities for one-on-one meetings outside of class at (cheap) hourly rates. There will be opportunities to browse the thousands of small press titles at SPD. And there will be a 30% discount for students! Throughout, we will all try to interrupt our own habits and patterns of thought to invite the different, other, and strange into the room.

LAURA MORIARTY'S A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 is just out from Omnidawn Publishing. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University among other places & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She received a Poetry Center Book Award in 1984 for Persia. She has also been awarded a Gerbode Foundation grant, a residency at the Foundation Royaumont in France, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature and a grant from the Fund for Poetry.

BRENT CUNNINGHAM is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancee and new daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. After receiving his MA in English from SUNY Buffalo in 1998, he began working for Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley, the nation's only not-for-profit distributor of literary books. He currently holds the position of Operations director. A board member of Small Press Traffic since 2001, he was a founding curator of SPT's "Poets Theater Jamboree," an annual ritual of amateur experimental theater. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. Hooke has published four titles so far, with two more on the way.

Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic

Poets Theater: An Evening of Short Plays

Friday, January 18, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

“The Obituary Show” by CA Conrad
“Olive Oil from the Notebooks, a radio film” by Arnold J. Kemp

Hannah Weiner’s “RJ (Romeo and Juliet)” from CODE POEMS, directed by Suzanne Stein

“Up in Arms: an Oratorio at Tense Borders” by Mary Diaz

“a fierce vexation of a dream” by sara m. larsen

“Yoda in His Youth” by Dana Ward

plus a new play by Mairead Byrne and more surprises!

1980s Poets Theater Revivified
Three Plays Reexamined, Reanimated, and Restaged

Friday, January 25, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

“Particle Arms” by Alan Bernheimer (excerpts)
“Third Man” by Carla Harryman (excerpts)
“Creative Floors” by Kit Robinson

Poets Theater Cabaret Extravaganza

At a local venue to be announced

Sunday February 3, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.

SPT’s first Poets Theater Cabaret will feature several acts, ranging from musical and video numbers to speed lectures, performance art, fluxus events, impersonations, puppet theater, acts of mysticism, live psychotherapy, experimental astronomy, food art, avant-gossip, and maybe even some —gasp! — poetry!

Join us for a night of costumed ribaldry, artistic blasphemy, and cultural craziness, along with drinks, food, bizarre raffle gifts, and a silent auction of not-so-silent wonders! Audience participation welcomed!

See our new weblog (smallpresstraffic.blogspot.com) for updates, directions, auction items, photos, and more!

Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco

New Yipes: Sun. 1/20: Gudath and Harryman with video by Ezawa and Berezin

7 pm
Sunday Jan 20
at 2 1 G R A N D
416 25th St corner B'way
Oak
$5

Carla Harryman is known for her genre-disrupting prose, poetry, and performance works. Recent publications include Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2006), Toujours l'epine est sous la rose (Ikko, 2006: tr. Martin Richet), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001). A collection of conceptual essays, Adorno's Noise, is forthcoming from Essay Press this spring. Recent performance pieces in Detroit, Montreal, Germany and Austria have featured bilingual choral improvisation and sound manipulation. Her 1994 work, Memory Play, will be staged at the Renaissance Society in Chicago in March 2008. She is also a participant in The Grand Piano collaboration, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers originally identified with Language Poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since her 1995 move out of the Bay Area, she has lived in Detroit.

Lauren Gudath lives in Petaluma, California, where the sky is always sunny and the butter and eggs are always fresh. There she writes sundry items for software companies and poems for a tiny audience that may include you. Lauren's publications include The Television Documentary (Second Story, 1999) and This Kind of Interpretation Brings Luck (Lucinda, 2000). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Kenning, Chain, and Bay Poetics.

Also showing: video by Kota Ezawa and David Berezin