Matthew Zapruder and Jason Bayani
Perform at the John Natsoulas Gallery
May 5th at 8PM
The Poetry Night Reading Series is proud to welcome poets Matthew Zapruder and Jason Bayani and on Thursday, May 5th at 8 P.M. They will be performing at the John Natsoulas Gallery at 521 1st Street in Davis.
Matthew Zapruder has recently been named The New York Times Magazine Poetry Column Editor, taking over the post from Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. Poet Laureate. Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2011, and Sun Bear, published in 2014. Why Poetry, a book of prose, will be published by Ecco Press in the spring of 2017. An associate professor in the English Department and the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, Zapruder is also editor at large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California.
Zapruder’s poems employ nuanced, conversational syntax to engage themes of grief, perception, and logic. As Dana Jennings noted in the New York Times, Zapruder has a “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture.” Discussing his own development as a writer in the Los Angeles Times, Zapruder addressed the role of rhyme in his work: “[T]he rhyme is what I would call ‘conceptual,’ that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the ‘obscurity of an order, a whole.’”
Jason Bayani is a graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is a Kundiman fellow and a veteran of the National Poetry Slam scene whose work has been published in Fourteen Hills, Muzzle Magazine, Mascara Review, the National Poetry Slam anthology, Rattapallax, Write Bloody’s classroom anthology–– Learn Then Burn, and other publications. As a member of seven National Poetry Slam teams, he’s been a National Poetry Slam finalist and has represented Oakland at the International World Poetry Slam.
Bayani is also one of the founding members of the Filipino American Spoken Word troupe, Proletariat Bronze, and has been an organizer for the Asian and Pacific Islander Poetry and Spoken Word Summit. His first book, Amulet was published in 2013 through Write Bloody Press and has garnered acclaim in literary magazines such as Zyzzyva and Glint. He is currently the program manager for Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American multi-disciplinary arts organization in the country.
The two featured poets will be introduced around 8 P.M., followed by an open mic, with music, at 9 P.M. and an after-party at 10:00 P.M. Come early to claim a seat or to add your name to the open mic list. Poetry Night in Davis is hosted by Davis Poet Laureate Dr. Andy Jones.
Upcoming Readings:
May 19: Linda Lancione and Laurie Glover
June 2: UC Davis Professor Katie Peterson and her English 100P Students
June 16: Science fiction icon Kim Stanley Robinson with Andy Stewart
July 21: Novelist, Performance Artist, and beloved Davis teacher Chris Erickson
Future: Other poets planned for the future include Richard Loranger, Joshua McKinney, and Joshua Clover.
Media Contact: Andy Jones
Email: aojones@gmail.com
The John Natsoulas Gallery 530-756-3938
www.poetryindavis.com
See the Facebook page for this event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/478441952350111/
You are also invited to join the Poetry in Davis Facebook group mailing list:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2290130152&ref=ts
