Sponsored by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Open City, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Park-Lit is a summer weekly series that stages readings sponsored by local literary magazines in city parks.
This year's participating magazines are:
Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, A Public Space, Opium, New York Tyrant, Guernica, BOMB, and Groundwork. See below for the schedule.
Groundwork
presents
A Brooklyn reading with Willie Perdomo and Patricia Smith in Von King Park, featuring music and events for children.
Wednesday, August 18, 6:30pm
Von King Park is in Bedford Stuyvesant, three blocks south of Dekalb ave. The amphitheatre where the reading will be held is nearest to the northeast side of the park near Lafayette Ave and Tompkins Ave.
- - Take the A to Nostrand Avenue. Walk 12 Blocks north to Greene Ave
- and 1 block east to Greene Ave OR
- - Take the G to Bedford/Nostrand Ave. Walk 1 & 1/2 Blocks east to Marcy Ave
- then walk 2 blocks south to Greene Ave.
- - OR take the G to Myrtle/Willoughby Ave. Walk 8 blocks south to Greene Ave.
Groundwork, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit, supports the development of powerful youth, powerful families, and powerful communities.
Past readings:
Opium Magazine and PARK-LIT present:
“Battle of the Boroughs”
July 28, 6:30–7:45pm
Sara D. Roosevelt Park (map)
(North side of the park just below Houston Street)
Directions: Subway: D or B to Grand Street, F or V to 2nd avenue, J to Bowery,
#6 to Bleecker Street
The creators of the acclaimed and outrageous competitive reading series “Literary Death Match” make mayhem in the great outdoors this July in the Lower East Side. Born and bred in New York City, these writers are as complex, provocative and original as the city that’s shaped them. Expect the unexpected and come ready to rumble -- this showdown will not be a spectator sport!
Michelle Carlo (The Bronx)
Michele Carlo is a writer/performer who has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and remembers when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. Her stories have been published in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood’s Lost & Found: Stories From New York, Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul and SMITH Magazine. A frequent contributor to NYC’s storytelling community, Carlo has been a two-time GrandSlammer at The Moth. Her memoir about growing up as a redheaded Nuyorican in 1960s-00s NYC, Fish Out Of Agua: My life on neither side of the (subway) tracks; will be published by Citadel Press in August.
www.michelecarlo.com
Ed Lin (Manhattan)
Ed Lin is the author of three novels -- Waylaid, This Is a Bust (both published by Kaya Press) and Snakes Can't Run (Minotaur Books). Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win two Members' Choice Awards in the Asian American Literary Awards. He holds degrees in mining engineering and journalism from Columbia. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung.
www.edlinforpresident.com
John Reed (Brooklyn)
John Reed is the author of the novels, A STILL SMALL VOICE (Delacorte Press), THE WHOLE (MTV / Simon & Schuster), the SPD bestseller, SNOWBALL’S CHANCE (Roof), ALL THE WORLD’S A GRAVE: A NEW PLAY BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Penguin/Plume), and the forthcoming TALES OF WOE (MTV Press). Reed is is the Books Editor of the Brooklyn Rail and has been published in Open City, Artnet, Artforum, Paper Magazine, New York Press, Timeout New York, Bomb Magazine, Playboy, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times. He is a current member of the board directors of the National Book Critics Circle. www.johnreed.tv
Jim O'Grady (Staten Island)
Jim O’Grady has worked as a reporter for The New York Times, professor of journalism at NYU and research director at The Center for an Urban Future, a policy think tank. He is the author of two biographies, “Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor” and “Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.” He has won seven Moth storyslams and The Moth GrandSLAM. Born and raised in the Bronx, he lived on Staten Island from 1990 to 2000, and lived to tell about it.
New York Tyrant Reading
Wednesday, June, 16th, 6:30 pm
BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE RAIN, THIS READING WILL BE HELD UPSTAIRS AT THE RUSSIAN SAMOVAR BAR
(NOT in Jackson Square Park as previously announced)
New York Tyrant Presents a reading by
Susan Froderberg & Eugene Marten, introductions by Gordon Lish
Russiam Samovar, upstairs
256 West 52nd street between 7th and 8th ave
Susan Froderberg's novel OLD BORDER ROAD will be published by Little Brown in December, 2010. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, as well as the New York Tyrant.
Eugene Marten is the author of Waste and In the Blind. He lives in New York City.
MR. BELLER’S NEIGHBORHOOD 10th Anniversary Reading In Washington Square Park
Thursday, June 24, 6:30 pm
Readings by:
Thomas Beller
Abigail Frankfurt
Phillip Lopate
Daniel Meneker
Christine Nieland
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Hal Sirowitz
Macdougal Street and Washington Square West
Round Plaza West of Fountain Area near the Alexander Holley statue
Directions: Subway: A, B, C, D, F, or V to W 4 Street - Washington Sq
A PUBLIC SPACE Magazine hosts an evening of music and stories from the Jazz Loft Project in Ft. Greene Park
Wednesday, July 7th, 6:30 pm
A Public Space, together with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Swingbound, host Author Sam Stephenson and a jazz quartet in beautiful Fort Greene Park.
Sam Stephenson has been researching the life and work of the photographer W. Eugene Smith since 1997. His 2001 book, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project, was published by W.W. Norton. Since 2002, he's been the Jazz Loft Project Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His book The Jazz Loft Project was published last year by Knopf and he is currently at work on a biography of Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The reading will take place outside the Visitor's Center toward the North East side of the park, nearest to Myrtle avenue and Washington Park
Directions: Subway: M, Q, R, or B Trains to Dekalb Avenue, #4 or #5 to Nevins Street, C Train to Lafayette Ave or G Train to Fulton St.
Guernica Magazine Reading in Union Square Park
Wednesday, July 21st, 6:30 pm
Joshua Kors (nonfiction)
Terese Svoboda (poetry)
Alexander Chee (fiction)
Joshua Kors is an investigative reporter for The Nation, where he covers military and veterans' issues Kors earned national attention for his work uncovering the veterans' benefits scandal. His three-part series showed how military doctors are purposely misdiagnosing soldiers wounded in Iraq, labeling them mentally ill in order to deny them medical care and disability pay. He is the winner of the National Magazine Award, George Polk Award, IRE Award, National Headliner Award, Casey Medal, Mental Health Media Award, and the military Reporters and Editors Award. He was also a finalist for the Michael Kelly Award, Livingston Award, Tom Renner Award, John Bartlow Martin Award, Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. His work is featured in the American Society of Magazine Editors' recent anthology The Best American Magazine Writing 2008.
Terese Svoboda’s poems are as haunting as they are funny, as pleasurable as they are powerful,” wrote Publisher’s Weekly about Terese Svoboda’s Weapons Grade, published last year by U. of Arkansas Press. Her fifth book of poetry, it contains poems that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Tin House. Svoboda is also the author of four novels and Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a memoir that won the 2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and was named “Best of Asia 2008” by the Japan Times. She taught fiction at Columbia’s School of the Arts this spring and this fall will see the publication of her fifth novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade.
Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction, a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, the Hermitage and the VCCA. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in fall of 2011. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Guernica, Out, The Morning News, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us and Mentors, Muses and Monsters. He has taught writing at Wesleyan, The New School and Amherst College.
