Mercury 20 Gallery is proud to bring some of the most prominent poets in the Bay Area to Oakland for poetry readings on the 20th of each month, starting in October. Each of the readings in the series, "Readings at 20" will begin at 7pm, and will feature two widely-published poets. A $5 fee at the door will cover refreshments and payment for the readers. Come hear good words and look at good art. Doors open at 6:30.
October 20: Maxine Chernoff and Linda Norton
November 20: Joseph Lease and Steffi Drewes
December 20: Geoff Bouvier and Steven Lance
January 20: Paul Hoover and Laura Walker
Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing, for which she won an editor’s award from CLMP in 1988. She is the author of six books of fiction and nine books of poetry. Of Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005), Cole Swenson said, “Among the Names [creates] a vast and layered network, in short, an economy. Exploring complexities of “the gift,” Chernoff’s is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new.” Her newest book of poetry is The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008). Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. With Paul Hoover, she translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, (Omnidawn Press, 2008), which received the 2009 Pen American Translation Award. She has read her poetry in Belgium, England, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Scotland, China, and Russia. In the summer of 2010, she taught in Prague.
Linda Norton is the author of the forthcoming book THE PUBLIC GARDENS: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011) and the chapbook HESITATION KIT (Etherdome 2007). Her collages and her essay, THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND ME, are at Counterpath Press Online. She has published poetry and prose in Poetry Flash, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Volt, 26, and many other magazines. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Kitchen in New York and at UC Berkeley and Cafe 504. It has also appeared on the covers of books by poets Julie Carr, Claudia Rankine, and Stacy Szymaszek, and on the cover of 27 Dissidents and the calendar of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State. Her poem, Landscaping for Privacy, has been set to music by composer Eve Beglarian. It appears on the album Tell the Birds and can be found on iTunes. Linda is senior editor at UC Berkeley’s oral history office in the Bancroft Library. From 1987-2001, she was a marketing manager and then an acquisitions editor at University of California Press in New York City and in Berkeley, where she started the New California Poetry series. She lives in Oakland.
