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Discussion: Carla Harryman and Alan BernheimerPost an Event »

Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at CCA

December 4 - December 4, 2009

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San Francisco

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CA
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California College of the Arts (SF)

December 4 - December 4, 2009

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1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Women's Studies and Creative Writing at Wayne State University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Born in Orange, California, Harryman studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University. In 1979, she co-founded the San Francisco Poets Theater, which staged numerous experimental plays, including her Third Man and other plays. Harryman has received grants and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Fund for Poetry, Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among others. Harryman's work is known for genre-disrupting poetry, performance and prose. In addition to her work and her interdisciplinary collaborations, she has written numerous experimental essays and writings about contemporary innovative women’s writing and experimental language-centered performance and co-edited a book devoted to the work of Kathy Acker. Born and raised in New York City, Bernheimer graduated in 1970 from Yale College, where he became friends with poets Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Rodger Kamenetz, and Alex Smith and studied literature with A. Bartlett Giamatti and Harold Bloom and poetry with Ted Berrigan, Peter Schjeldahl, and Bill Berkson. He continued his association with the New York School poets and the St. Mark's Poetry Project for several years, and moved to San Francisco in 1976, where through Benson and Robinson he met other writers--such as Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten--who would soon become known as the San Francisco Language poets. Bernheimer wrote and performed for Poets Theater and produced and hosted the radio program of new writing by poets, "In the American Tree" on KPFA from 1979 to 1980.