JERRY #3
Laynie Browne's most recent books include Roseate, Points of Gold, The Desires of Letters, and The Scented Fox. She is currently reading Amulet by Roberto Bolano. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. * Sara Femenella’s work has been published in Dossier, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Normal School, and Pleiades among others. She is the online literary editor for Dossier Journal and works at Poets & Writers Magazine. Currently she is reading Michael Crummy's Galore and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She also just worked her way through Anthony McCann's Moongarden, Paul Legault's The Madeleine Poems and Dawn Lundy Martin's Discipline––all three pretty great. * Andrew F. Giles is a poet and translator whose has work in Ambit, Equinox, Paper X, Poetry Scotland, The Nervous Breakdown and Collective Fallout. He edits Scotland’s online literary arts & culture journal New Linear Perspectives. Andrew always has at least three books on the go, a couple of journals and a copy of the TLS. At the moment he is enjoying the latest editions of Gutter and Ambit, and books on the go are Allan Massie's The Ragged Lion, on Walter Scott, George Eliot's Silas Marner and a battered copy of Born Free by Joy Adamson. Online-wise, he'd like to big up New Linear Perspectives and the GoReborn collective, both Scotland-based. * Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Edward Helfers studied English and Philosophy at Duke University. After earning his M.F.A. at Columbia University, he has taught composition and creative writing at Montclair State and Yeshiva Universities. His short fiction has appeared on Web Conjunctions. He currently lives in New Mexico with his wife and son, where he is working on a novel that explores the early years of Longevicalism, a small religious order based in the American West. He is currently reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje. Also, this is awesome. * Dawn Marie Knopf was born and raised in Yosemite National Park, Ca. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Bomb, Black Warrior Review, and Verse. She is currently reading The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector. * Marni Ludwig was born in New Jersey and spent the last fifteen years living in NYC, working as a literary arts administrator and bartender. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where she is the Third Year Poetry Fellow and teaches an undergraduate poetry workshop. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Assembly, Boulevard, and Western Humanities Review. Her chapbook, Little Box of Cotton and Lightning was selected by Susan Howe for a 2011 PSA Chapbook Fellowship. She's reading and rereading Adelia Prado's Alphabet in the Park this summer and recommends checking out this interview. * Amanda Nazario is a graduate of the MFA program at CUNY - City College. Her work has been seen in Harpur Palate, SmokeLong Quarterly, New South, failbetter, and elsewhere. She lives in Jersey City. Hear her on the radio sometimes: here. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis currently graces her bedside. * Felice Neals comes to the fiction, non-fiction and screenwriting table from a background in art history, film, theater and work in the arts and humanitarian non-profit sector. She is currently studying creative writing and Media/Film Studies at The New School and formed Long Limbs Productions in 2007 as an outlet for her documentary film projects which explore global and domestic subject matter. Her film work includes Sight in Flight: Inside the Flying Eye Hospital, Follow Me Home, and A Family Affair. She just finished The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman and is in hot pursuit of Ben Okri. * Brooklyn native Chris Miskiewicz is a multi-media performer working in television, film, music and comics. He’s the writer of the web-comic EVERYWHERE, published monthly on Act-I-vate, and founding member of the Brooklyn-based psychedelic rock group Swinger Eight. You can often see him wandering around his apartment eating peanut butter out of a jar with a spoon. * Susannah Nevison's recent poetry can be found in Western Humanities Review. She currently works in publishing, lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work finishing her first collection, and is poetry editor for Revolution House. She thinks you should read Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. * Michael Schiavo is the author of The Mad Song and the chapbooks Beautiful School, 275 Ocean Avenue, Ranges I, and Ranges II. Having dubbed Shakespeare, he's currently working on versions of Virgil's Eclogues and Dante's Inferno. You can read outtakes from the latter at the blog Little Fires. He daily reads Emerson, is currently re-reading Lear. Recent enjoyment includes Chris Martin's Becoming Weather, the reissue of WCW's Spring and All, and any/everything by Paul Violi. He lives in Vermont. * Along with publishing several books of poetry, most recently his New and Collected Poems and The Burning of the Books, and being an acclaimed translator, George Szirtes is currently trying to save the Poetry Society, a British institution whose funding was recently cut, from ruin by addressing a petition signed by Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Liz Lochead, Jo Shapcott and hundreds of others. Trace the petition’s history here. Szirtes’s recent reading has chiefly been on music, particularly on Liszt, Bartók and 'gypsy' music, for programs on BBC radio and television about the Promenade Concerts and for Liszt's 200th birthday. For sheer pleasure: Geoff Dyer's Working the Room and Thomas Transtromer's poems. * Kera Yonker's work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency and other publications. She is the founder and host of the 2nd Draft Reading Series as well as the fiction editor for JERRY. She recounts the trials of unemployment on her blog, Will Work for Food, and is currently at work on a book of essays about a break-up. Her ex-boyfriend is thrilled. Last great book read: The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier.