The Folding Chair

Nineteen of Rachel Cantor’s stories have appeared in magazines such as the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and DoubleTake. Her stories have been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, and have been short-listed by both the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She lives in Kensington.

Marie-Helene Bertino has been a diner waitress, a muralist, and a singer in a band.  Her stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII, North American Review, Mississippi Review, Inkwell, The Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, Five Chapters, and West Branch.  She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize three times, receiving the award in 2007 and a Special Mention in 2011.  She hails from Philadelphia and lives in Brooklyn, where for six years she was the Associate Editor of One Story.  She has taught for The Gotham Writer’s Workshop and One Story’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop and has received fellowships from Hedgebrook Residency and NYC’s Center for Fiction, where she is a current fellow.  Her collection of short stories SAFE AS HOUSES received The 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award, judged by Jim Shepard, and will be published in Fall of 2012.

Eric Sasson received his M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and has taught fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop. His short story collection, “Margins of Tolerance,” was the 2011 Tartt First Fiction Award runner-up and is forthcoming from Livingston Press in May 2012. His story “Floating” was a finalist for the Robert Olen Butler prize. Other recent publication credits include stories forthcoming in Connotation Press and Explosion Proof as well as recently published in BLOOM, Nashville Review, The Puritan, Liquid Imagination, Alligator Juniper, Trans, The Ledge, MARY magazine and THE2NDHAND, among others. He’s honored to have been awarded a 2010 residency fellowship to the Anderson Center in Minnesota, where he completed an edit of his first novel, as well as a Hambidge residency for August 2012. He was born, bred and still resides in Brooklyn.

The Folding Chair is (as ever) free, but bring your allowance for local kombucha/beer/wine and small plates.

TO GET HERE:

61 Local, 61 Bergen St, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

Bergen St. (F/G) or Borough Hall (2,3,4,5)

THE FOLDING CHAIR ON TWITTER: @foldingchairbk

Come celebrate May Day and poetry on Tuesday, May 1st at TFC 2:2 at 61 Local, Brooklyn from 7-8:30 pm with KEITH J. VARADI, ANASTASSIIA BOTCHKAREVA and MATT LONGABUCCO.

KEITH J. VARADI is an artist, poet, and musician. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1985. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011 and his BFA in Painting and Printmaking with a minor in English from Rutgers University in 2008.

An interloper in the field of poetics, ANASTASSIIA BOTCHKAREVA is working on her dissertation in art history at Harvard University. She is currently based in New York on a research fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As an undergraduate, she completed the creative writing program at Columbia University, where she also studied art history and philosophy.

MATT LONGABUCCO’s poems have appeared most recently in Clock, With+Stand, X Poetics, and Conduit. He teaches writing and literature in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, and lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn. He is sentimental or superstitious about aspects of this life onto which others cast a coldly realistic eye, and vice versa.

THE FOLDING CHAIR is (as ever) free, but bring your allowance for local kombucha/beer/wine and small plates.

TO GET HERE:
Bergen St. (F/G) or Borough Hall (2,3,4,5)

Please join us for our one year anniversary party of THE FOLDING CHAIR! Tuesday, April 3 from 7-9 pm at 61 Local, 61 Bergen Street Brooklyn, as we celebrate local art, food, and the community it creates.  Our illustrious lineup includes CATHY PARK HONG, MORES McWREATH and BEN LERNER.

CATHY PARK HONG’s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton.  Her third book, Engine Empire, will be published in May 2012. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions,  McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, American Letters & Commentary and other journals, and she has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, and Salon.  She is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

MORES McWREATH was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, USA in 1980. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union, an MFA from the University of Southern California and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Recent solo shows include CUE Art Foundation selected by Andrea Zittel and Between Everywhere at Kunsthalle M+B in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in two person or group shows at the Allcott Gallery UNC Chapel Hill, ICA Philadelphia, Walker Art Center, Art in General, International Studio and Curatorial Program NY, and John Connelly Presents. His videos have been screened in festivals and exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the Taiwan International Video Exhibition, Videomedeja Serbia, 700IS Iceland, and the Jakarta International Video Festival. He currently teaches at The Cooper Union.

BEN LERNER is the author of three books of poetry, all published by Copper Canyon Press: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010). His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published last year by Coffee House Press. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a Howard Foundation Fellow. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie for the German translation of The Lichtenberg Figures. 

The night also includes musical performances by SIMON BEINS, MARGARET GLASPY and ROWLAND STEBBINS, a specially designed limited edition poster by GRAHAM PARKS and KAYROCK SCREENPRINTING, local libations generously provided by KINGS COUNTY DISTILLERY, RED HOOK WINERY, and local brewers JARED GREENFIELD and AUSTIN HAASE, pie by FOUR & TWENTY BLACKBIRDS, and a door raffle by CUT BROOKLYN. Free and open to the public. Come celebrate with us! xo, the Folders, Oana Marian and Prudence Peiffer.

Same time, same place: 7pm, 61 Local

TO GET HERE:
Bergen St. (F/G) or Borough Hall (2,3,4,5)

Pull up a chair for a multimedia TFC with poetry, art and fiction!

DEBORA KUAN is a poet, writer, and critic. Her debut collection of poetry, XING, was published in October 2011 by Saturnalia Books. She is the recipient of a Fulbright creative writing fellowship (Taiwan), University of Iowa Graduate Merit Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, Santa Fe Art Institute writer’s residency, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her fiction has appeared in Opium, The L Magazine, The Rumpus, and Wigleaf, and in 2010, she won The L Magazine’s Literary Upstart award. She has also written about contemporary art and film for Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Paper Monument, and other publications.

LETHA WILSON was raised in Colorado and received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, and her BFA from Syracuse University. Letha attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and her artwork has been shown at many venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, Arko Arts Center (Seoul), BravinLee Programs, Sue Scott Gallery, PARTICIPANT Inc, Vox Populi, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2012 Letha will be an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, and has been awarded the Farparth Grant and Residency in Dijon, France. Her first solo exhibition in NYC will be at Higher Pictures in Fall 2012. Letha currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. See www.lethaprojects.com.

SARI WILSON recently finished a draft of her first novel, which centers on New York in the 1970s and 1980s and a girl’s perilous journey through the ballet world. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Slice, Agni, and The Oxford American and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction, a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in fiction, and a residency from Yaddo. She has worked as a writer and editor at publishing venues as varied as Harcourt Education and Playboy Magazine. (The latter made for better cocktail party conversation.) Sari grew up in Brooklyn and trained professionally as a ballet dancer, which gave her a lifelong distaste for cottage cheese and lots of material for this novel.

The reading is (as ever) FREE, but bring your allowance for local kombucha, beer & wine.

Please also mark your calendars: The Folding Chair celebrates its 1 year anniversary next month, on Tuesday APRIL 3rd…You won’t want to miss it!

Same time, same place: 7pm, 61 Local

TO GET HERE:
Bergen St. (F/G) or Borough Hall (2,3,4,5)

Please join us upstairs at 61 Local for words and music at the 11th TFC, with Nicholas Boggs, Margaret Glaspy and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan.

NICHOLAS BOGGS is working on his first book, a personal account of his search for the untold story of James Baldwin’s collaboration with the French painter Yoran Cazac. His work has appeared in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU Press), Callaloo, and Mary: A Literary Quarterly. A 2011 MacDowell Colony Fellow, he’s also recently been a resident at Yaddo and the recipient of a work study (“waitership”) scholarship in Non-Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He teaches part-time at Columbia University and curates the reading series Queer Readings at Dixon Place on the Lower East Side.

Born and raised in Northern California, MARGARET GLASPY has brought her indescribable voice to the east coast and New York City couldn’t be happier. Recognized by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts in 2007, Glaspy was given a Gold Award in Popular Voice and proceeded to earn recognition as a Presidential Scholar of the Arts and an SLE Ambassador of the Arts in China, all in the same year. Now, a few years later, she is a committed student to the music around her and has been writing some of the most innovative and heartfelt material of her generation. With a list of influences including Omou Sangare, Feist, Jeff Buckley, and Nina Simone, she has created a sound and writing style that is undeniable, honest, and a tribute to the beautiful music that she has discovered throughout her 23 years.

CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN is the New York-based author of “A Tiger In The
Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family” (www.atigerinthekitchen.com) which was published by Hyperion in 2011. She was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and InStyle magazine. Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times,The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Food & Wine, Marie Claire, among other places. In March/April 2010 and also in December 2010, she was an artist in residence at the Yaddo artists’ colony, where she completed her memoir. Born and raised in Singapore, she crossed the ocean at age 18 to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. She started her full-time journalism career helping out on the cops beat in Baltimore—training that would prove to be essential in her future fashion reporting. Both, it turns out, are like war zones. The only difference is, people dress differently. She is currently working on her second book, a novel.

The reading is (as ever) free, but bring your allowance: there will be local books, music and (as ever) kombucha/beer/wine for sale.

Same time, same place: 7pm, 61 Local

TO GET HERE:
Bergen St. (F/G) or Borough Hall (2,3,4,5)

Please join us for our 10th Folding Chair reading on Tuesday, January
10th at 7 pm upstairs at 61 Local (61 Bergen St, BK).  It’s an all poetry set with HANNA ANDREWS, WILL SCHUTT & MARK SULLIVAN. Come early and stay late for local beer, wine, kombucha and light fare in a convivial space.

HANNA ANDREWS is the co-editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback
Books. She works as an editor at the Academy of American Poets, where
she edits the journal American Poet. Her first book, Slope Move, is
forthcoming in 2012 from Coconut Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

WILL SCHUTT is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the
Academy of American Poets, Oberlin College and the Stadler Center for
Poetry at Bucknell University. His poems and translations have
appeared in many journals, including Agni, A Public Space, FIELD,
Harvard Review, The Southern Review and Verso, a culture and arts
magazine based in Siena, Italy, which he co-founded in 2003. He was
the fall 2011 James Merrill House Writer-in-Residence.

MARK SULLIVAN’s first collection of poetry, Slag (Texas Tech
University Press, 2005), won the Walt McDonald First Book Series
competition.  Booklist praised Slag as a “powerful” debut full of
“deftly written poems [that] have a wonderful and appealing balance of
emotion and intellect.”  Sullivan’s other honors include a
“Discovery”/The Nation Prize and a 2007 literature fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts.  His poems, essays, and reviews have
appeared in many publications, including Beloit Poetry Journal, New
England Review, and The Southern Review. Sullivan was born in Willmar,
Minnesota, and grew up in Massachusetts.  He received a B.A. from
Middlebury College and also studied as an undergraduate at Oxford
University.  He has an M.A. from Columbia University and has lived for
many years in upper Manhattan with his wife, the painter Elizabeth
Terhune.

The Folding Chair is a monthly reading series in Brooklyn featuring
local writers, artists and musicians.

TO GET TO 61 LOCAL:
Bergen St. (F/G), BOROUGH HALL (2,3, 4, 5)

ALL PROSE LINE-UP:

Alex Tilney has an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College and has been published in The Southwest Review.  He was a recent artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony.

Laurence Klavan has had short work published in such literary magazines as The Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, and Pank, and a collection is forthcoming from Chizine Publications. His novels, “The Cutting Room” and “The Shooting Script” were published by Ballantine Books, and he won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America under a pseudonym. His graphic novels, “City of Spies,” and “Brain Camp,” co-written with Susan Kim, were published in 2010 by First Second Books, and their Young Adult series, “Wasteland,” will be published by Harper Collins. He received two Drama Desk nominations for the book and lyrics to “Bed and Sofa,” the musical produced by the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Finborough Theatre in London.

More at http://www.laurenceklavan.com/

Katie Pfohl is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Harvard University and currently works as a curatorial fellow in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her dissertation examines the relationship between painting and design in late 19th and early 20th century American art, and she also has designs on writing a novel someday.

Same time, same place, as ever: 7pm, 61 Local. Please join us!

TFC is very pleased to host this fierce posse of local writers:

Eric Amling: http://www.humanhairandco.org/

Matvei Yankelevich: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/about/people/matvei-yankelevich/

And a special film screening by Ben Fain: http://www.benfain.com/

See you soon — same time, same place, 7pm at 61 Local.

Poetry by Chris Hosea: http://chrishosea.com

Jonathan Thirkield: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20965

Songwriting by Rowland Stebbins: www.myspace.com/rowlandstebbins  

Looking forward: Eric Amling, Alex Tilney, Kristina Baranovich, Katie Pfohl, Will Schutt, Mark Sullivan and more… 

Always at the same time, same place: 7pm, 61 Local. Please join us! 

Timothy Donnelly earned his BA from The Johns Hopkins University and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University’s MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He is a professor at Columbia University and has been the poetry editor of Boston Review since 1995.  

Donnelly is the author of Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove Press, 2003), and The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010)

http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new_american_poets/timothy_donnelly/

Prudence Peiffer and Oana Marian are the founders of The Folding Chair. 

Poetry by Caolan Madden

Fiction by Michael Tedesco

Poetry by Rob Crawford

Looking forward: Timothy Donnelly, Rowland Stebbins, Eric Amling, Alex Tilney and more…

First Tuesday of every month, same time, same place.

JOIN US!

AUGUST 2, 2011

MICHAEL TEDESCO
ROB CRAWFORD
CAOLAN MADDEN

JULY 5, 2011

MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER
CHRIS MARTIN
SIMON BEINS

JUNE 7, 2011

BENITA HUSSAIN
TIMOTHY STANLEY
THERESA COULTER

MAY 3, 2011

DANICA NOVGORODOFF
NICOLE FIX
JOSEPH GULEZIAN

APRIL 5, 2011

SAM FRANK
GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS
RACHEL ROTHBART
PRUDENCE PEIFFER
OANA MARIAN