Fiction Series Program Director: Victoria N. Alexander

Emerging Poet of the Year: Kevin O'Sullivan

UPCOMING EVENTS :

A Series of Salon Events: Informal and focused evenings of literature and discussion among a select group of writers, artists, and thinkers. Dactyl is launching a new reading series with a novel approach. There is no dearth of readings in NYC. We want to fulfill a need that is not being met by traditional formats. We want our audiences to be engaged and to be able to recall lines and passages. The poets in this series will read fewer poems, most of them twice. Key passages may be repeated again by voices in the audience. With intimate seating and a limited number in attendance, we will take our time with each poem, inviting the audience to reflect back to the poet what they are hearing.

Friday, June 6th, 2008
7:30 - 9:00
MARIE PONSOT, Award-winning Poet and Mentor to Generations
with
KEVIN O'SULLIVAN, Dactyl Foundation's Emerging Poet of the Year

RSVP@Dactyl.org  seating is limited

MARIE PONSOT, a native New Yorker, was born in 1921. She has published numerous works, including Springing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Green Dark (1988); Admit Impediment (1981); and True Minds (1957). When asked why poetry matters, Ponsot replied: "There's a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief, that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us." Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Frost medal, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. In addition to translating many books from the French, Marie Ponsot has taught writing at Queens College, Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the YMHA, Columbia University, and New York University. She currently teaches at The New School University in New York City.

KEVIN O'SULLIVAN, Dactyl Foundation's Emerging Poet of the Year 2008, has worked as a writer, teacher, entrepreneur, actuary, cryptographer, salesman, sailor, calligrapher, and draftsman; and along the way, completed a Masters in English and subsequent work toward the PhD at CUNY. As a graduate fellow, he met Marie Ponsot when they were both teaching at Queens College. No longer "distracted from poetry by earning a living," he has just completed Marie Ponsot's Poetry Thesis Workshop at the 92nd Y. He seeks out the strengths of contemporary poets, an example being Marie's "felicity of expression as a function of ferocity of quest." Other examples include "the lexical exuberance of Richard Kenney and Saskia Hamilton; Byzantine yet matrix-perfect syntax of Jorrie Graham (even the anomalies enchant); revelations of relationship in Stephen Dunn and Marie Howe; the pop-right-out ordinary speech that dazzles in an Ashbery poem; the loaded, omen-laden terseness of both Kay Ryan and Charles Simic, and idea-round-ups in an Anne Carson, Paul Muldoon or Auggie Kleinzahler poem."

Archive of Past Poetry Events

Archive of Fiction Readings

Nov 9, 2006

SLSA Creative Writers Read,Sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts

Bob Martinez, Dept of Biology, Quinnipiac University, "The Gold Shop"
Martinez's short story "The Gold Shop" deals with the contrast between economic systems and real value, what is important in life and what is not important, and the idea that we should appreciate things for their own value, not for values that are imposed on them by others. It is set in the Principality of Asturias, in northern Spain, at some uncertain time in the past (maybe 200 to 300 years ago), and fuses the real, the mythical and the magical. Born in California and raised in Niagara Falls, New York, Martinez earned his BS in Biology at Niagara University and his PhD in Genetics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Biology at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, where he has served as department chair for 18 years. His teaching interests are both scientific and interdisciplinary and include genetics, bioethics, and a course in science and literature which touches on biological evolution, cultural evolution, genetics, philosophy, religion, history, languages and linguistics, and issues of censorship.

Bruce Beasely, Dept of English, Western Washington University
Beasely will read from his recent collection, Lord Brain, poems which are drawn from neuroscience and cosmology. The book is an extended meditation on the nature of mind and self, interweaving language and images from cosmology, neuroscience, and theology. Beasely is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Lord Brain (winner of the University of Georgia Press contemporary poetry series competition). He won the 1996 Colorado Prize (selected by Charles Wright) for his book Summer Mystagogia, and his book The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems will be published this fall. His sequence on DNA and the Human Genome Project, "Genomic Vanitas and Memento Vivi," appeared recently in The Kenyon Review. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and two Pushcart Prizes in poetry.

Suzanne Paola, Poet and Non-Fiction Writer
Paola (Susanne Antonetta) will read from her poems and non-fiction works on environment, radioactivity, and cloning. Paola is the author of the nonfiction works A Mind Apart (Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), a study of neurological diversity and its role in processes of evolution, winner of the NAMI/Ken Johnson award for promoting understanding of mental difference, and Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, a life story told through the lens of environmental pollution. Body Toxic was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an American Book Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Lives of the Saints, weaves together theological immortality, the half-lives of radiation, the US Human Radiation Experiments of the Cold War, and such contemporary dilemmas as cloning.

Laura Otis, Dept of English, Emory University, "Lacking in Substance"
"Lacking in Substance" follows the cross-country trek of a scientist-turned-creative writing teacher who is struggling to write a novel and to rekindle a relationship that foundered 20 years ago. Her adventures on the road are told alternately with scenes from her emerging novel, in which an indigent young woman cares for a demented old woman who was herself a scientist in her youth. Otis began her career as a Biochemist and Neuroscientist and changed her focus to literature in the mid-1980s. She is the author of the academic books Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), and Networking (2001) and the translator of Santiago Ramon y Cajal's Vacation Stories (2001). Since 1997, she has been writing novels, of which Lacking in Substance is the fourth. She is currently a Professor of English and Liberal Arts at Emory University and a guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Friday Sept 16, 2005

Rebecca Goldstein Fiction reading. Goldstein was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her publications include: The Mind-Body Problem, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, The Dark Sister, (Whiting Writer's Award), Mazel (National Jewish Book and Edward Lewis Wallant awards), Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, and Strange Attractors (National Jewish Book Honor Award).

Friday Oct. 25, 2002 Josip Novakovich

Croatian-born Novakovich has published numerous works of fiction, including, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters. He received the Whiting Writer's Award (1997), Guggenheim Fellowship (1999), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1991 and 2002), and a fellowship at The New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers in 2001/02. Novakovich also teaches in the English Department at Penn State University. Introduction by Victoria N. Alexander