This past Friday was the opening reception for Double Vision at PYRO Gallery. A group show featuring 17 Artist/Writer pairs and their collaborative work. Almost every medium is represented from sculpture and ceramic to oil and digital collage. Some of the writings are placed on the wall close to the visual representation, some are incorporated within the piece, in a block of text, while others are incorporated line by line or poem by poem by being draped across, tied, or affixed with a decoupage. Over the next few weeks, PYRO will be hosting readings of the pieces as follows:
Thursday 1/22, PYRO Gallery, 7pm
Kristen Miller, Fred Smock. William Smith, Ellyn Lichvar, David Harrity
Thursday 1/29, PYRO Gallery, 7pm
Sarah Gorham, Lynnell Edwards, Makalani Bandele, Annette Allen, Michael Estes
Thursday 2/5, PYRO Gallery, 7pm
Sean Patrick Hill, Martha Greenwald, Adam Day, John James, Kathryn Welsh
Keep Louisville Literary will be hosting some of these Writer/Artist pairs on the radio hour on ArtFM for an in-depth discussion about their collaborative process.
Kay Polson Grubola is an artist and independent curator in Louisville, Kentucky. Creating assemblages using natural found objects, Grubola’s work is a celebration of nature. The work is also an allegory for the natural process of human life, both its ascendance and its decline. She has shown her work nationally and internationally.
Grubola was the Executive Director of Nazareth Arts, a regional arts center on the campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, as well as the Artistic Director of the Louisville Visual Art Association. For 10 years she taught drawing and printmaking at Bellarmine University and Indiana University Southeast.
An active curator Grubola has organized many exhibitions in a wide range of topics. Her exhibits have ranged in subject matter from original concept drawings from the design studios of GM, Chrysler and Ford muscle car era to a nationally recognized extravaganza of handmade dinnerware and exquisite table design, which wowed audiences for more than 20 years.
Lynnell Major Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, most recentlyCovet (October, 2011), and also The Farmer’s Daughter (2003) and The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), all from Red Hen Press. Her short fiction and book reviews have appeared most recently in Connecticut Review, American Book Review, Pleiades, New Madrid, and others. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where, since 2010 she has been president of Louisville Literary Arts, a non-profit literary arts organization that sponsors the monthly InKY reading series and The Writer’s Block Festival. She is also Associate Professor of English at Spalding University. She also teaches creative writing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and is available for readings and workshops in a variety of settings.
C.J. Pressma is a graduate of Antioch College and holds an M.F.A. in Photography from Indiana University. He studied as a special graduate student with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University.
In 1970 he founded the Center for Photographic Studies – an alternative school of creative photography. The Center provided a learning experience for those seeking to explore photography as creative expression. During its eight-year existence the center attracted students from over 35 states and foreign countries to its full-time resident program and provided part-time instruction and darkroom access for hundreds of students in the Louisville metropolitan area. Its two galleries provided monthly photographic exhibits featuring the works of local, regional, and internationally acclaimed photographic artists including Ansel Adams and Minor White.
In 1978 he was awarded a National Endowment Fellowship in Photography.
In 1979 Pressma embarked on a career as a multimedia producer and marketing communications specialist. In 1984, his seven part series Witness to the Holocaust, was released in the U.S. and Canada where it remains in distribution today. One of the first productions to use survivor interviews as the exclusive content to tell the story of the Holocaust, Witness to the Holocaust has received numerous national awards.
In 1997 he was awarded the American Advertising Federation’s prestigious Silver Medal Award for “outstanding contributions to advertising and furthering the industry’s standards, creative excellence, and responsibility in areas of social concern.”
In December,2001 Pressma was awarded a Fellowship by the Kentucky Arts council.
Pressma is represented by Pyro Gallery in Louisville.
Poet, playwright, and essayist Jeffrey Skinner’s most recent book (memoir, advice, humor), The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets, was published to wide attention and acclaim, including a full page positive review in the July 19, 2012 Sunday New York Times Book Review. His most recent collection of poems,Glaciology, was chosen in 2012 as winner in the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and will be published by Southern Illinois University press in Fall, 2013. Skinner has published five previous collections: Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press), A Guide to Forgetting (a winner in the 1987 National Poetry series, chosen by Tess Gallagher, published by Graywolf Press), The Company of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series), Gender Studies, (Miami University Press), and Salt Water Amnesia (Ausable Press). He has edited two anthologies, Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance; and Passing the Word: Poets and Their Mentors. His numerous chapbooks include Salt Mother, Animal Dad, which was chosen by C.K. Williams for the New York City Center for Book Arts Poetry Competition in 2005. Over the years Skinner’s poems have appeared in most of the country’s premier literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, FENCE, Bomb, DoubleTake, and The Georgia, Iowa, and Paris Reviews.
Also a playwright, Skinner’s play Down Range had a successful limited run at Theatre 3 in New York City in the Spring of 2009, and will again be produced in Chicago in 2012-13. His play Dream On had its premier production in February of 2007, by the Cardboard Box Collaborative Theatre in Philadelphia. Other of Skinner’s plays have been finalists in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Conference competition, and winners in various play contests.
Skinner’s writing has gathered grants, fellowships, and awards from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts (1986, & 2006), the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the state arts agencies of Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, Vermont Studios, and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. His work has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio. In 2002 Skinner served as Poet-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut.
He is President of the Board of Directors, and Editorial Consultant, for Sarabande Books, a literary publishing house he cofounded with his wife, poet Sarah Gorham. He teaches creative writing and English at The University of Louisville.
Jessica Farquhar holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Purdue where she was the assistant director of Creative Writing. She is a Louisville native, and current resident. Her poems have appeared in Catch Up, Word Hotel, ABZ, Transom, New Madrid, Poetry East, and Lumberyard; reviews and interviews in Sycamore Review.
Adam Day was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He received his MFA in creative writing at New York University, where he was poetry editor for the program’s national literary journal, Washington Square. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and the Arts, Crab Orchard Review,Seattle Review, and others.
Another opportunity to workshop in Louisville is on the Horizon with The Kentucky Writing Workshop. “..A special one-day “How to Get Published” writing workshop on Friday, Feb. 6, 2015, at the Holiday Inn Louisville East.”
In addition to the instructional courses, 5 different literary agents will be in attendance taking pitches for books & novels.
All information about agents, workshops, and registration available HERE
Chuck Sambuchino will be on Keep Louisville Literary on January 29th to discuss the event.
Chuck Sambuchino (chucksambuchino.com,@chucksambuchino) of Writer’s Digest Books is the editor of Guide to Literary Agents as well as the Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market. His authored books include Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript; Create Your Writer Platform, which was praised by Forbes.com; andHow to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, which was optioned for film by Sony. He oversees one of the biggest blogs in publishing (the Guide to Literary Agents Blog) as well as one of the biggest Twitter accounts in publishing (@WritersDigest). He is a freelance editor who has seen dozens of his clients get agents and/or book deals, and he has presented at almost 90 writing conferences and events over the past eight years.
keep.louisville.literary 