420 Western Avenue
Albany, NY, 12203
United States
Thursday April 3 @ 7:30
Standish Rooms
The Events and Athletics Center (Second Floor)
420 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
Free and open to the public
There will also be a 5pm public talk with Mesmer and Winter in Albertus Hall, Room 216, which is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jonah Winter is the author of two poetry volumes, Maine, winner of Slope Editions’ first book prize, and Amnesia, winner of the Field poetry prize. The recipient of the Cohen Award from Ploughshares magazine and a Pushcart Prize in poetry, Winter also is an award-winning author of more than 30 books for children and adults, writing and illustrating books about baseball players, avant-garde artists, jazz musicians, exotic dancers, presidents, manual laborers, Beethoven’s difficulties moving in and out of 39 different apartments, garbage, 12th-century mystics and his own father’s experiences growing up in East Texas during the Great Depression. Two of his books, Diego and Here Comes the Garbage Barge!, were selected as New York Times Best Illustrated Books. His biography of President Obama, Barack, was a New York Times Best-Seller, and his book, You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!, was a New York Times Editors Pick. Winter’s previous book in this series, You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, was chosen as the best non-fiction picture book of 2009 by Booklist.
Sharon Mesmer is a descendant of Franz Anton Mesmer (creator of “mesmerism”) and a two-tailed, sword-wielding, vatic mermaid named Meluzina from the Vistula, the longest river in Poland. Many of her published works — which have appeared in magazines like Poetry, the Wall Street Journal, New American Writing and Evergreen Review, as well as the anthologies Postmodern American Poetry—A Norton Anthology (second edition), Poems for the Nation: Edited by Allen Ginsberg, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women — retell the ancient Slavic legend of how Meluzina courageously led Prince Zbigniew the Short to a smelly old fishing village devastated by exploding unicorn boners and ordered him to found the city of Warsaw in 1294. Mesmer, like her ancestress, has always urged us courageously forward, for example in essays written for her column, “Seasonal Affect,” which ran for three years in the French magazine Purple, and her flarf poems, which are universally despised by poetry enthusiasts the world over. Still, few can deny the truth of her famous pithy aphorism: “Ne iterum capitur caudam porta tincidunt” (“Don’t let your second tail get caught in the door”). She teaches creative writing at New York University, the New School and online for the Chicago School of Poetics. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, Crossing Second Avenue (from ABJ Books, Tokyo) and Half-Angel, Half-Lunch. Her fiction collections are In Ordinary Time, The Empty Quarter, and Ma Vie à Yonago (from Hachette, in French translation). Mesmer is also a Fulbright recipient and a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry.