Rhapsodomancy Announces the Writers Reading on February 8, 2009

PAUL LISICKY GAYLE BRANDEIS LYNNE THOMPSON CARINE TOPAL

Sunday, February 8, 2009
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:30pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles, 90027 (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla@yahoo.com (RSVP not required, but appreciated)
$3 suggested donation at door.
There will be a cash bar.
www.rhapsodomancy.org
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder (Graywolf Press). His work has appeared in Five Points, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, The Seattle Review, Subtropics, Truth in Nonfiction and other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a winter fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch University Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA program at Fairfield University. In the fall of 2009 he'll be a visiting professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. A new novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming. For more see: http://paullisicky.blogspot.com.

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications), The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, and Self Storage: A Novel (Ballantine) as well as the forthcoming novels, Pears (Ballantine, 2010) and My Life with the Lincolns (Holt, 2010). Gayle's fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Salon.com, The Nation and the Mississippi Review, and have won several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award and a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award. In 2004, the Writer Magazine named Gayle a Writer Who Makes a Difference. Gayle is on the national staff of the women's peace organization CODEPINK and is a founding member of the Women Creating Peace Collective. Mother to two teenagers, Gayle teaches creative writing at UC Riverside and Antioch University. You can find her at www.gaylebrandeis.com.

Lynne Thompson won the 2007 Perugia Press Book Prize for her first full-length collection of poems, Beg No Pardon. Beg No Pardon was also awarded the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A frequent reader, both locally and nationally, Thompson is also the author of two chapbooks: We Arrive By Accumulation and Through A Window and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Essence, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, and Blue Arc West, An Anthology of California Poets. She is employed as the Director of Employee & Labor Relations at UCLA.

Carine Topal, a native New Yorker, writes and teaches in Los Angeles. She has lived in Jerusalem, Israel, where she worked with Palestinian merchants, traveling to villages and towns in the West Bank and Bethlehem. She was also employed by the Office of Assimilation, in a small town outside Jerusalem, working with Morrocan Jews. She then lived in Germany on the American army base in Heidelberg. Since 1982, she has anthologized the poetry of special needs children. She participated in the grassroots organization California Poets in the Schools. She was the Poet-in-Residence for the city of Manhattan Beach and Poet-in-Education for Manhattan Beach elementary schools. In 1994, her first collection of poetry, God As Thief, was published by The Amagansett Press. Her work has appeared in Water-Stone, Caliban, The Best of the Prose Poem, Pacific Review, Greensboro Review and many other journals throughout the U.S. and Canada. In 2004, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2005, awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, as well as a fellowship in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2006, Carine had the good fortune of teaching poetry at the VA Hospital in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and most recently, the 2007 Robert G. Cohn Prose Poetry Award from California Arts and Letters. A special edition chapbook, “Bed of Want,” was published by Black Zinnias in January 2008. Her new collection of poems, “In the Heaven of Never Before,” was recently published by Moon Tide Press.