Interview with Tireless Artist Matt Hart: poet, teacher, Typecast Publishing and H_NGM_N author, and punk rocker

Poet Matt Hart will be reading with novelist Patrick Wensink @Java Bardstown for the February 22^nd installment of Speak Social at 7:30pm. I haven’t spoken with Patrick Wensink—who’s readings have been known to become drinking games as Erin Keane will tell you here, and who also had “four  days of (internet) fame” after receiving the world’s “nicest cease and desist letter” from Jack Daniels whiskey— but I was fortunate to catch up with Matt (busy poet, father, educator, and musician) to try and dig up some insight for those of you who may not already be aware of this prolific, regional powerhouse of written and spoken verse.

Brandon Stettenbenz: Let’s clear the air. This interview is not going to be as awesome as the one you did with BookSlut (it’s really worth a read!); of course that was a few years back… Since then, you’ve put out a book with Typecast Publishing here in Louisville, called “Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless.” Your band, Travel, also did an album inspired by the book. Can you fill us in on that experience?

Matt Hart: I’ve been a big fan of Lumberyard (the print magazine that Typecast publishes) almost since the beginning. I think it’s really exciting what they do with typography, exploding the poems, reconfiguring and re-contextualizing the various moving parts of the lines and stanzas, emphasizing the visual, material, and sculptural (not to mention, wooden and concrete) qualities of language. There’s something radical and radicalizing about their vision, and the DIY nature of the thing is something that really resonates with me and with my background, both with Forklift, Ohio (the magazine I co-founded and edit) and in punk rock.

With that in mind, I was only maybe a third of the way into the poems that became Sermons and Lectures, when I started thinking that Typecast would be the perfect publisher for that book. The poems are so full of fracture and speed, and the material quality of the language that comes through in the collage technique is a prevalent mode of the book’s poems. Of course, there are also numerous references to early punk rock and the idea that everything might fall apart at any second.  It seemed to me to that the book had a lot in common with the Typecast aesthetic and vision, so I approached Jen Woods about it, and she liked the manuscript and took it on. I don’t remember exactly when in the process I got the idea to do a new Travel record using cut-up versions of the Sermons and Lectures poems as lyrics, but it all sort of came together right around the same time. The resulting record, Blank Sermons…Relentless Lectures, is one of Travel’s best, I think; full of noise and skronkiness that actually ends up sounding like music. Go figure.

Working with Typecast, and with Jen in particular, was truly a wonderful experience. She really helped me with ordering the manuscript, but more than that she’s a really careful editor, and I think she understands my aesthetic sometimes better than I do. I hope I get to work with her and Typecast again at some point. But regardless, I know that we’re friends for the long haul. She really is my Weird Sister.

Note: (Typecast Publishing is an immeasurable asset to our literary scene here in Louisville, and a growing force among American small presses. You can check out their impressive catalogue here, including Lumberyard magazine #10 featuring Mary Ruefle, Maurice Manning and more)

BS: I’ve read and heard mostly the poems from Sermons, but in older and more recent journals I’ve observed that your voice has remained loud; there’s really no other way to describe it whether in print or in person. Do your see this as a product of your punk/rock n’ roll roots and/or an intrinsic personal trait?

MH: Well, okay, I get that. But I think of my more recent work, especially the post Sermons and Lectures stuff that’s been appearing here and there, as really domestic, romantic, nearly pastoral in some of its tonalities and urgency toward melody/rhapsody/narrative. In fact, if I could have my way, with my new book Debacle Debacle, I would whisper the poems to one listener at a time. Sadly, that doesn’t usually fly so well against the backdrop of espresso machines and clinking beer bottles.  It’s hard at most readings to be desperately, energetically, and personally low volume—almost no one would be able to hear the poems!—even though that’s often how I hear them in my head, and certainly the way I read them out loud to myself as I’m writing them. It’s the way I imagine someone else reading them too.

I should say also that just reading poems in a monotone is so incredibly awful to my ear that I just can’t allow myself to do it. Poems are alive. They have their own peculiar voices. At a reading I’m not trying to read them the way a reader would/should read them. That’s a thing done in the privacy of one’s mind, one’s mouth, one’s soul—if we’re lucky. Poets need to realize when they’re reading in public that they’re performing. There’s an audience in front of you, and they deserve a thing delivered, a call for their response. But also the poems deserve to be inhabited and brought to life.

That said, I always try pretty hard to create something of a dynamic range in the work—all one volume all the time gets kind of boring. With Sermons and Lectures, which takes a lot of its inspiration from punk rock and hellfire and brimstone preaching there’s certainly a lot of “loud,” but that’s contrasted with very modulated quiet passages. The final sequence “Blood Brothers and Weird Sisters” has a much different tonality than a lot of the rest of the book. It’s a denouement and a finality—a last gasp—and is the result of a kind of necessary exhaustion, a gradual fade out. It is true that often at readings I like to try and build momentum (which itself often comes with increasing the volume, either incrementally or radically)—to make poems ramp up with a fever, to press their bewildered faces against the infinite—whatever that is. I definitely think that this desire for a dynamic range in the work comes from my background in music. The “louds” I want to be really loud, but the “quiets” should be barely audible, so that people have to lean in and stop breathing.

BS: The other unique thing your poems have impressed upon me is a feeling of constant work, struggle, striving, experimentation, and change that seems to extend through absurd, metaphysical, political, and historic landscapes that are ultimately examining your own past and present. What I see more than anything in your work is a tenacious drive to examine and expose the self, to unearth and divulge your own thoughts (in this instance I’m assuming the narrator of your work is most often yourself as opposed to a generalized “the self”). Do you see poetry in general or at least your own as a mode of growth, self examination, perhaps therapy or necessary release from the pressures we all face;  an exorcism/meditation if you will?

MH: I think I believe that artists always get to the universal via the personal (which is a paraphrase of something the painter Robert Motherwell said). But I don’t think of the poems as therapy. I’m not solving mental problems; I’m blasting off with joy or being awe struck or playing (which is a very serious thing). My poems are mostly exploratory, [meaning that] they point back to the process of their making and/or are demonstrations of a particular way of paying attention (my way of paying attention)— which I hope is something recognizable to other people, something they can connect with/to [via similarities] they find between my way and their way. I want my poems to open a window in the reader/listener’s life—from me to you, from you to me, and back again, forever. In other words (with other worlds), to create and court experiences of empathy is ultimately what I’m after.  Empathy is (and this is a paraphrase of something Dean Young has said) the imaginative act of putting yourself (figuratively, metaphorically) so entirely and intensely in someone else’s shoes that you feel what they feel. For me, empathy is a kind of visceral entanglement of the self with the other—one that’s entirely based in the notion that we are a lot more similar than we are different.  But it’s also those similarities which are the basis for appreciating and celebrating difference.

Of course, first and foremost, and whatever the aims, the poems have to be the best poems—as poems—that I can make, and I try to do that any way I can. I don’t want to limit possibility. I want to delimit it. My books are all really different from each other by design, because I am always trying to find new opportunities in the language—both in its form and its content—to reach out, to shock and be shocked and get a charge from our common humanity. I’m not worried about establishing a voice. I have faith that a voice will emerge from the activity of ranging far and wide wherever my interests and attention take me.

BS: Your new book from H_NGM_N Books (“Hangman” when you say it out loud) is called Debacle, Debacle. Folks can pre-order it here, an option that’s been up for only about a week. H_NGM_N also put out your last collection, so I assume you’ve forged a good working relationship with them. Could you tell us about the new book, your experiences working with H_NGM_N and a bit about them as a publisher?

MH: Well, just to be clear, H_NGM_N did my 2010 book WOLF FACE, but Typecast put out my last collection Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless in 2012. And in between those was a collection (mainly of several chapbooks) called Light-Headed that came out from BlazeVOX in 2011. My first book, Who’s Who Vivid, came out from Slope Editions in 2006—don’t wanna step on any editorial toes here.

As for Debacle Debacle, Nate Pritts, who founded, runs, and edits H_NGM_N, is a friend of mine from grad school. We’ve kept in close touch over the years, and all that time he’s been such an incredible champion of my work. I’m really grateful to Nate for his faith and trust in my process and poems. He’s truly my brother in more ways than one. As it turns out, many of the poems in Debacle Debacle respond directly to poems of Nate’s, or to ideas that we were both thinking about and discussing at the time the poems were written—ideas about friendship and the creative process, our respective domestic situations, my dumb (and very dumbly—I won’t go into it) broken foot. It’s funny, though, those poems seem to have all been written such a long time ago—2009-10 (a few in early 11). I’m two manuscripts beyond them now, but I’m excited that the book is finally coming out. I deliberately haven’t really read them anywhere, so that I can figure out how to do that when the book is in the world as a book. I just did one of those NEXT BIG THING interviews where I talk all about Debacle Debacle—its origin story. Anyone who’s interested can see it here. I’ve really loved working with all of the editors I’ve been fortunate enough to work with. Every one of them has been terrific and insightful. There aren’t many instances, I don’t think, where you get to work with your best friends, so I feel really lucky to get to do that.

BS: Another new accomplishment/change came in the form of a visiting Assistant

Professorship this past fall at the University of Texas, Austin. I’ve never been to Austin (unfortunately!), but I’ve spent plenty of time in Cincinnati. They must be very different places. I must admit, I’m completely in the dark about both schools, though I’ve heard and read a few things about UT’s Creative Writing MFA. How did you like Austin; was it a big adjustment? Did you find more enthusiastic students at UT than the Art Academy of Cincinnati, or perhaps a larger pool of creative writing students?

MH: I loved being at UT. The city of Austin’s great, but I was so busy that I didn’t really spend much time wandering around—though I did get to see Dinosaur Jr., Pianos Become the Teeth, La Dispute, and Willie Nelson w/ Asleep at the Wheel (not all on the same night, of course). The music scene’s intense. Anyway, the big difference between what I was doing in Texas and my usual gig at the Art Academy was that at UT I was teaching grad students, which I loved, in addition to undergrads. All the students at UT were awesome, but I found the grad students in particular to be wild and bewildering with brightness and all manner of full-throttle inspiration and anxiety (which can be an artist’s best friend). I adore them all—really. They made me such a better teacher and writer. I actually wrote about 75 poems while I was there and quite a lot of prose on poetry, too. It was poetry twenty-four seven, which is really different from my normal life. I’m married (14 years!) and I have a six year old daughter. My family couldn’t come with me to Texas, so in terms of that, I didn’t have the usual (very good—and very necessary for me) distractions of family life to contend with. Thus, I got even more work done than usual, but I was also missing my home life terribly. I loved being in Austin (where I have some amazing friends, in addition to the amazing students), but it’s also really good to be back home in Cinci.

As for the Art Academy, that’s a great gig too. It’s art-college—undergraduates—so all of my students are artists, my colleagues are artists, and there’s an incredibly high degree of interplay between visual and written expression.  The whole building smells like oil paint and words.  And I have some awesome poets that never cease to up the ante and challenge me as a teacher and a poet. I’ve been teaching there now for thirteen years, and I really do love it.  

BS: Cincinnati is just a stone’s throw away, so I assume you’ve read here before (apart from the sneak peak of Sermons you laid on us at the Writer’s Block open mic in 2011). Louisville is also a music-centric town, bar town, etc… has your (I’ll venture to say) distinct brand of exuberant reading been well received here, historically?

MH: Louisville’s a really fun city—a lot like Cincinnati actually—with its river life and little neighborhoods. People in Louisville have always been really warm and welcoming to me. I’m excited to be coming back. Of course, I’m always glad to get to see Jen Woods and her husband Bill, both of whom have become great friends and collaborators (not just with Sermons, but) in various kinds of mischief over the years. For me, a reading is always a time to reconnect with old friends one already knows and also to meet new people and potentially make new friends, not only in terms of the art, but on a personal level as well. These days I like readings more for who I get to see and meet than for anything having to do with people seeing me read—though reading is an incredibly invigorating and gratifying experience. It’s fun to share the work.

BS: Poetry in general, especially performed live can be a thing of energy, and you seem to plug right into it before cranking the gain up to eleven. Are you hoping to get the Speak Social crowd riled up on the 22nd?

MH: I’ll definitely bring a good energy supply—I do hereby promise. I have lots of new poems, and I’m excited for the opportunity to see how some of them fly in the air. Can’t wait. See you on the 22^nd!

 

Bio (from the author’s own page):

Matt Hart is the author of four books of poems, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), as well as several chapbooks. A fifth collection, Debacle Debacle, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2013. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and Post Road, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL.

Poet Kiki Petrosino on “Fort Red Border” + her forthcoming “Hymn for the Black Terrific”

Kiki Petrosino will read with fellow poet Kyle Thompson next Friday, Sept. 21^st @JavaBrewing (1707 Bardstown Rd.) as part of the Speak Social reading series. Keep Louisville Literary contacted Ms. Petrosino to discuss her debut collection Fort Red Border (published locally by Sarabande Books in 2009) and recent projects:

Keep Louisville Literary: The title sequence of your book Fort Red Border, places Robert Redford (the name  of which your book title is an anagram) as the paramour of the narrator. I imagine that you chose him, rather than Sean Connery or another distinguished elder actor, as your subject for specific reasons.

Kiki Petrosino: The Redford figure emerged as a kind of “cure” for the loneliness of my particular speaker. In the simplest terms, imagination is a way for her to conjure up some company. In the series, “her” Redford takes on varying shades of reality and unreality, kind of flickering there, between those two states.

KLL: Movie stars often take on characteristics of or seem to embody their most famous roles.  Considering all the dangerous/charming characters Mr. Redford has played, what is the function of his presence in your poems? Is his role in your poem supposed to solicit the collective cultural impression of him?

KP: Actually, that collective familiarity was a constraint that I worked against in writing this series. Rather than rely on the reader to supply what they might already know about “Redford,” I wanted to give this interlocutor characteristics that would speak to the specific condition of my speaker. She’s really the star of that series. It’s her desire to speak, the urgency of her loneliness that gives rise to the poems.

KLL:   Your work consistently references daily modern life in a light hearted banter, even when contemplating broad social concerns and broad swaths of human emotion and experience. Can you tell us about this unique approach?

KP: Daily life is often absurd, strange, and hilarious. There has to be room to express some of that in poetry. I tend to produce poems that leave room for laughter, even when I’m not intending to be funny. When I try to be too serious, I just end up tripping over my clown shoes. 

KLL: In some of your poems, the narrator’s search for answers often begins with an explication of someone else’s emotions. Is this done with the intention to prepare the reader for climax or catharsis, or are you insinuating a history to add depth to the story-in-progress?

KP: I don’t know. It could be that my speakers have a (Good? Bad?) habit of comparing their stories to those of others as a way of processing and/or framing their own emotions. In many ways, the speakers of my poems are outsiders. They feel distanced from the world we might describe as “normal” or “mainstream.” What they know about love and loss comes from their own experiences, yes, but also from listening to other people’s stories.  

KLL: You are a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop; arguably the largest and most well known MFA program in the U.S. Could you tell us how working in that setting, with so many prestigious teachers and talented peers, shaped Fort Red Border?

KP: I wrote many of the poems in my first book while a student at the Workshop. It was an amazing experience from beginning to end, principally because the Workshop brought me into the global community of writers. The years I spent as a graduate student—and, later, as a program assistant at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program—were formative of my poetic sensibilities. But living in Iowa City also taught me a lot about what it means to be a supportive member of an artistic community. Now that I’m an assistant professor at the U of L, I try to emulate the community-building values I learned in Iowa so that my students can also benefit. 

KKL: Finally, can you tell us anything about your collection due out next year from Sarabande?

KP: My new book, Hymn for the Black Terrific, explores the dangers of obsession, particularly those which focus on the female body. The book contains three series of poems that alternately meditate on artistic identity; on issues of race; and on food &eating.

Kiki Petrosino is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville, where she teaches literature and creative writing.  Author of a poetry chapbook The Dark is Here (Forklift, Ohio, 2011), and a collection of poems, Fort Red Border (Sarabande Books, 2009), she holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  Kiki also co-edits the electronic poetry journal Transom. You can find her work in Tin House, The Harvard Review, The New York Times and elsewhere.

Speak Social progenitors speak up about their reading series!

“Speak Social” is the newest reading series in Louisville, KY. Co-curated by John James and Sarah Maddix, the series features local writers, two per event, as well as an up-and-coming local musician. These events take place at Java Brewing Co. or “Java Bardstown” (1707 Bardstown Rd.), are open to the public, and best of all free! Keep Louisville Literary corresponded with John and Sarah to discover the origins of Speak Social, where the series is headed, and  a little bit about its progenitors.

KLL: What are your personal backgrounds concerning spoken word events and/or literature, and how does this shape Speak Social?

John James: Before we started Speak Social, I had just moved back to Louisville from Brooklyn, New York, where I completed my [MFA]and hosted a reading series called Metro Rhythm. [It] was quite similar to [Speak Social], but instead of an open-mic we featured M.F.A. candidates. Being in NYC, where there are several topnotch programs, there was never a dearth of talented young readers. Plus, being at the center of America’s literary culture, we were able to attract some really amazing “headlining” readers—Mark Strand, Mary Jo Bang, and Timothy Donnelly, to name a few. It was sad to give up the series when I left, but it’s in good hands and is going on its fourth season this year. So I’d say it was primarily that experience that’s shaped Speak Social for me. It taught me how to host a reading, how to promote it, what problems to anticipate, and how to contact [potential] readers. I’d wanted to start something similar to that here, where I perceived a lack of such literary events, but didn’t find the motivation until Sarah contacted me about it.

Sarah Maddix: Though I’m not an aspiring writer, I adore poetry, and enjoy attending all sorts of literary events… I’ve found that there’s a bit of disconnect between academia, aspiring writers and those who just enjoy literature. It’s a shame, for example, that the same few people will frequent either Sarabande (book’s reading series at hotel 21c) or [the InKY series]—two established series that I love attending—and there’s not much overlap between them. So my interest in starting Speak Social grew from a desire to see Louisville’s literary scene become a bit more inclusive. John and I strive to make Speak Social an inviting space that will nurture community and make literature accessible to all kinds of folks.

KLL: How do you think Speak Social fits with other, older Louisville reading series such as InKY or Sarabande’s series at 21c?

SM: First of all, I really enjoy them both. InKY was the first reading series in Louisville that I ever attended (and still do) and we even used their event structure—an open mic, featured readers, and music—as a guide in developing Speak Social. And I have Sarabande’s series at 21c to thank for my recent discovery of Ada Limón, an amazing poet. Because we have such respect for these series, John and I have no interest in trying to compete with them for an audience. Rather, we want to create some intermingling between these two established series, [and others] such as Subterranean Phrases and Stone Soup. Our goal is to see Louisville develop a vibrant arts scene that encourages creativity, diversity, and community.

KLL: Are there any differences that make Speak Social unique?

JJ: Yes and no. In terms of atmosphere, we’ve tried to model Speak Social after the Holler Poets Series in Lexington. If you’ve ever been, you know that Holler always draws a huge crowd. But more importantly, these people laugh, they cry, they yell out loud. It’s a lot of fun! Most readings aren’t like that at all, which is where I think we differ from your average poetry event. I’ve been to so many readings, especially in NYC, where I just wanted to fall asleep. I’d find myself working my way to the bottom of my glass rather than listening to the readers. Sarah and I want to avoid that at all costs. What we’ve aimed to do with this series is to play up the social aspect of poetry readings—hence the title, “Speak Social.” We encourage our audience to shout, clap, and hoot. However the work strikes them, we want to see that emotion. We also host a party following every reading, at which we hope to foster conversation about the work, but also about class, race, philosophy, and aesthetics—all the social and intellectual concerns that encompass the writing we’ve heard that night.

KLL: Tell me a bit about your upcoming readers for September and why you chose them.

JJ: In September we’re featuring Kyle Thompson and Kiki Petrosino, with music by Mike James of the Louisville band “Been to the Gallows”. I’ve known Kyle for some time, first as a poet, and only later as a person, but he’s never failed to intrigue me. His poems are so strange, often experimental, and yet they usually offer a narrative. He has one, an older one now, called “Fable of the Snails,” which was published in AGNI. That one does tell a story, but it’s more of a slanted glimpse into human history than an actual story about snails… He read at the Writer’s Block festival last fall, but I was out of town, so asking him to read was my way of getting to hear a poet I’ve always wanted to hear.

SM: I’ve been interested in having Kiki read for Speak Social since coming across her first book, Fort Red Border. I love this collection because it fuses together everything I love about poetry; it is both cerebral and imaginative (the first section, for example, explores a fanciful relationship with Robert Redford), but her style is often conversational, making the poems tangible to the reader. I’m particularly fond of the last section, a set of ten poems all titled “Valentine.” She has a new collection due out from Sarabande next year, so I’m really excited to hear what she’s been working on recently.

JJ: I’m probably a little bit biased about Mike—he’s my brother. But he’s also a super-talented musician… I remember watching him sound out early tunes by Green Day when he was about eight years old. It was amazing to me then. He’s played in different bands over the years, but recently started playing with this group Been to the Gallows. They just put out an album called A Knock at the Door, and have been playing shows all over town. This show will be different, though, as it features Mike playing solo and acoustic (they’re usually a very loud, electric duo). If nothing else, having the focus solely on Mike, coupled with the acoustic set, will provide a unique experience for followers of his work.

KLL: Do you envision Speak Social as a continuing series? If so, who might we expect to see next season (and when does this season end)?

SM: We’d love for Speak Social to run as long as possible. We were toying with the idea of taking the holidays off after our October 19th event—featuring readers Lynnell Edwards and Sean Patrick Hill, with music by Alex Udis—but recently the literary magazine Catch-Up approached us about collaborating on a release party for their fall issue, and we just couldn’t turn down promoting such a unique new journal. The Catch-Up Release Party is set for November 2nd, which will wind down our 2012 season. However, we do have a party in the works for December to celebrate our season and thank everyone for their support, so keep your eyes peeled for that! We’ll resume in full swing in January with featured readers David Harrity and Martha Greenwald, though the exact dates haven’t been determined quite yet.

KLL: Do you have any long-term goals considering the direction, location, scale or format of Speak Social?

JJ: Personally, I’d like to bring in a few writers I know from New York, but that requires a lot of money. For one thing, I’d want to offer those people at least a small honorarium, but we’d also have to pay to fly them out here and put them up for a night or two. Sarabande is probably the only series around funded well enough to do something like that. Although, I’ve considered initiating a special fund called “Bring Timothy Donnelly to Speak Social” in order to raise that kind of money. Maybe it’s a little unrealistic, but not totally impossible.

SM: I’m a big fan of slam poetry and such spoken word poets as Sarah Kay and Saul Williams, so reaching outside the realm of academia and attracting some performance poets from the area is an interest of mine. And although it’s important to keep Speak Social relevant to Louisville folks, I too wouldn’t mind attracting some bigger names from outside the state… Overall, though, I’d love to see Speak Social become a driving force in a thriving arts scene in Louisville, while most importantly keeping the “social” atmosphere that we’re trying to achieve.

KLL: Are you actively seeking sponsors?

JJ: We are. Originally Java Brewing Company had funded honorariums for our readers, but it’s just unrealistic to think they can continue doing that. To raise money more immediately, Sarah and I [plan to start] a Kickstarter account. It’ll be online soon. [The] money would go to fund honorariums, create flyers, and if we have enough, to purchase a mic and P.A. system. Up until now, anything we’ve purchased for the series has come out of pocket, and we pretty much rely on our musicians for sound equipment. It’s been kind of a D.I.Y. operation. We’re also planning to apply for grants from the Kentucky Arts Council, South Arts, and the Center for Nonprofit Excellence, but that money—if we get it—wouldn’t come in until late next year.

KLL: Is there any other information readers and writers in the area should know about Speak Social?

SM: We’d love submissions! If you’re interested in reading, playing music, or finding out more information about Speak Social, you can contact John and me at speaksocialky@gmail.com. You can also visit our website at speaksocialky.wordpress.com. Lastly, help spread the word and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/SpeakSocialKy/!

Featured readers at Speak Social have included poets Jeffrey Skinner, Adam Day, and Biancca Spriggs, as well as novelist Kirby Gann. On Sept. 21^st poets Kiki Petrosino and Kyle Thompson will read at 7pm.

@InKYSeries         @JavaBardstown          @sarabandebooks