Start your summer off with by tapping into your creative spirit at the 3-Day PSP-in-NYC festival of Literature, creativity and the Bohemian spirit, June 3-5, at Czech Center New York on the Upper East Side. All events, except the master classes, are free and open to the public.
Three Rooms Press is proud to be cosponsoring this amazing 3-day festival with Prague Summer Program for Writers and Czech Center New York, under the auspices of the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York.
The festival kicks off on Friday, June 3 with a gala reading and book fair. The book fair expands on Saturday, June 4, and activities include a lecture on Chaos and the Creative Process, master classes, and a reading with world-renowned poets and authors. Sunday, June 5 starts with a lively panel discussion on the benefits of travel for the creative process, followed by master classes and a gala closing reading.
DETAILED SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
Friday, June 3, 7pm: Book Readings, Signings, & Poetry App
The festival kicks off with a spirited reading on Friday June 3, featuring authors Ivan Backer (My Train to Freedom), Three Rooms Press author and poet Richard Katrovas (Raising Girls in Bohemia), Anna Nessy Perlberg (The House in Prague), Kevin J. McNamara (Dreams of a Great Small Nation), Charles Novacek (Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance), and, Jo Anne Elikann (111 Places in New York that you must not miss!), and, fyi: Czech Center New York is one of them! The event will also feature an introduction to Poetizer App, the first ever global social network for poets and poetry lovers. Complete details about the reading at Czech Center New York website.
Friday June 3, 7-10pm and Saturday, June 4, 11am-5pm: Bohemian Book Fair
Publishers of the authors involved in the Friday night reading will be on hand to sell works by all of the authors featured. Buy a book and get it signed!
Books/Publishers on Friday night include:
111 Places in New York that you must not miss! By Jo Anne Elikann (ACC Distribution)
Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance by Charles Novacek.(Ten21 Press)
Dreams of a Great Small Nation by Kevin J. McNamara (Public Affairs Books)
The House in Prague by Anna Nessy Perlberg (Golden Alley Press)
Raising Girls in Bohemia: Meditations of an American Father by Richard Katrovas (Three Rooms Press)
My Train to Freedom by Ivan Backer (Skyhorse Publishing)
Saturday, June 4, 2016
- 11:00am-5:00pm: Ballroom
Bohemian Book Fair (Free and open to the public) - 11:00-12:30: Cinema
Chaos and the Creative Process
A discussion by Randy Fertel, author of A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation
(Free and open to the public) - 1:00 to 3:00 pm: Ballroom
Master Class A Advance registration required; now closed
Poetry: Anne Marie Macari;
Fiction: Richard Katrovas;
Creative Nonfiction: Christopher Merrill - 4:00 to 6:00 pm: Ballroom
Master Class B Advance registration required; now closed
Poetry: Stanley Plumly;
Fiction & Creative Nonfiction: Richard Katrovas - 6:30-9:00 pm: Gallery
Readings and Q&A
(Free and open to the public)
Stanley Plumly, Christopher Merrill, Anne Marie Macari, Gerald Stern
Sunday, June 5, 2016
- 11:00-12:30: Cinema
Panel Discussion on Travel and its relation to the creative process.
(Free and open to the public) - 1:00 to 3:00 pm: Václav Havel Library
Master Class C Advance registration required; now closed
Poetry: Beth Ann Fennelly;
Fiction: Robert Eversz;
Creative Nonfiction: Patricia Hampl - 4:00 to 6:00 pm: Václav Havel Library
Master Class D Advance registration required; now closed
Poetry: Richard Jackson;
Fiction: Richard Katrovas;
Creative Nonfiction: Alison Hawthorne Deming - 6:30-9:00 pm: Gallery
Readings and Q&A
(Free and open to the public)
Robert Eversz, Beth Ann Fennelly, Richard Jackson, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Patricia Hampl
All events will be held at Czech Center New York, 321 E. 73rd Street, New York, NY. Phone: 646-422-3399
About the Bohemian Book Fair Publishers
ACC Distribution ACC Distribution is publisher of beautifully designed high end illustrated books on subjects as varied as art, architecture, fashion, design, photography, food and travel. We publish & distribute books representing over 90 international publishers from all over the world. ACC is proud to celebrate its 50th year in publishing this fall.
Armchair/Shotgun Armchair/Shotgun believes that good writing does not know one MFA program from another. It does not know a PhD from a high school drop-out. Good writing does not know your interstate exit or your subway stop, and it does not care what you’ve written before. Good writing knows only story. Armchair/Shotgun publishes poetry, fiction, interviews and visual arts on real honest-to-goodness paper.
Belladonna Series The Belladonna* mission is to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable and dangerous with language.
Bottle of Smoke Press Bottle of Smoke Press was started in 2002 to publish new and well-established avant-garde poets in short-run editions. In 2004 we started printing some titles letterpress and now offer our books in paperback, hardcover as well as deluxe editions. We use the finest materials and strive to make the books appearance match the excellent writing that we are honored to publish. We are located a little over an hour north of NYC in the hamlet of Wallkill, NY.
Brooklyn Arts Press Brooklyn Arts Press (BAP) is an independent house devoted to publishing new works by emerging artists. We believe we serve our community best by publishing great works of varying aesthetics side by side, subverting the notion that writers & artists exist in vacuums, apart from the culture in which they reside & outside the realm & understanding of other camps & aesthetics. We believe experimentation & innovation, arriving by way of given forms or new ones, make our culture greater through diversity of perspective, opinion, expression, & spirit.
Golden Alley Press Golden Alley Press is a small, independent publisher located in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Our tagline, “Books you’ll want to read, written by people you’ll want to meet,” describes our mission to bring interesting new voices to light, particularly in the areas of memoir and theology.
great weather for media great weather for MEDIA focuses on the unpredictable, the fearless, the bright, the dark, and the innovative. We are based in New York City and showcase both national and international writers. As well as publishing the highest quality poetry and prose, we organize numerous events locally and across the country.
McPherson & Co McPherson & Co is an independent, literary and arts press founded in 1974. We specialize in literary fiction (American as well as translations from Italian, Spanish, and French), contemporary culture (art theory, performance, film, philosophy), and occasional cross-genre projects. The press is based in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Polity Books Polity is a leading international publisher in the social sciences and humanities and we publish some of the world’s best authors in these fields. Our aim is to combine the publication of original, cutting-edge work of the highest quality with a systematic programme of textbooks and coursebooks for students and scholars in further and higher education.
Public Affairs Books Public Affairs is a non-fiction book publisher in New York City, publishing “good books about things that matter.”
Skyhorse Publishing Skyhorse Publishing is the publisher for Ivan Backer’s memoir My Train to Freedom: A Jewish Boy’s Journey from Nazi Europe to a Life of Activism. As Backer recounts in his memoir, in May of 1939, as a ten-year-old Jewish boy, he fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for the United Kingdom aboard one of the Kindertransport trains organized by Nicholas Winton. Detailed in this true story is Backer’s dangerous escape, his boyhood in England, his perilous 1944 voyage to America. Now he is an eighty-six-year-old who has been and remains a life-long activist for peace and justice.
Ten 21 Press Ten21 Press was founded by Sandra Novacek in 2011 to publish “important, creative works and authentic stories of high quality”. Ten21 Press’s debut book is Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance. The memoir was published to fulfill Sandra’s promise to her late husband Charles Novacek who dreamed of publishing his firsthand account of survival as a youth amid the Nazi and Communist occupations of Czechoslovakia during WW II and the Cold War.
Three Rooms Press Three Rooms Press is a fierce New York-based independent publisher inspired by dada, punk and passion. Founded in 1993, it serves as a leading independent publisher of cut-the-edge creative, including fiction, memoir, poetry translations, drama and art.
Ugly Duckling Presse Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a Brooklyn-based small press by a volunteer editorial collective that has published more than 200 titles to date. UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking. UDP is committed to keeping its publications in circulation with our online archive of out-of-print chapbooks and our digital proofs program. http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org
About the Featured Authors (in alphabetical order):
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s most recent nonfiction book is Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed, 2014). She is the author of three additional nonfiction books and five poetry books, most recently Rope (Penguin, 2009) with Stairway to Heaven due out from Penguin this year. Her first book Science and Other Poems won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, she has also received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Former Director of the UA Poetry Center, she is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. A faculty member at the Prague Summer Program, she included in her poetry collection Genius Loci a sequence set in Prague, poems fueled by the need to make some balance between the beauty and horror of history. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada.
Robert Eversz is the author of six novels that have been translated into 15 languages. His novels have been named to best of year lists at the Washington Post, Oslo Aftenposten, Manchester Guardian, BookPage, and January Magazine. Robert teaches workshops in the novel at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and is a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program. One of the country’s most experienced mentors in the pedagogy of writing the novel, he has served as the final judge for the AWP Award Series In the Novel and the Allegra Johnson Prize in Novel Writing, and has been Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at Western Michigan University.
Beth Ann Fennelly directs the MFA Program at Ole Miss where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s won grants from the N.E.A., United States Artists, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and one of nonfiction, all with W. W. Norton. Her most recent is The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin. They live in Oxford with their three children.
Randy Fertel holds a PhD from Harvard University where he received a teaching award by student vote. He has also taught English at Tulane, LeMoyne College, and the New School for Social Research. His award-winning 2011 memoir, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, unspools untold tales as he tries to makes sense of his parents – and himself – in a colorful, food-obsessed New Orleans. Novelist Tim O’Brien calls his new book, A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation, “a stunner of a book – smart, jarring, innovative, witty, provocative, wise, and beautifully written.” Kirkus Reviews called it “A tour de force of reading in the fields of literary theory and history befitting a George Steiner or Erich Auerbach.”
Patricia Hampl’s most recent books, The Florist’s Daughter and Blue Arabesque, were both among The New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year.” She is the author of four other prose works, and two collections of poetry. Her essays, poems, short fiction, travel pieces and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and others. Her new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2017. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (in poetry and in prose). She is a MacArthur Fellow, and is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, and a Visiting Professor at Kingston University-London where she works on writing related to human rights.
Richard Jackson has published over twenty books including thirteen books of poems, most recently Retrievals (C&R Press, 2014), Out of Place (Ashland, 2014), Resonancia (Barcelona, 2014, a translation of Resonance from Ashland, 2010), Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (Autumn House, 2004), Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (Ashland, 2003), and Heartwall (UMass, Juniper Prize 2000), as well as four chapbook adaptations from Pavese and other Italian poets. His own poems have been translated into seventeen languages including Worlds Apart: Selected Poems in Slovene. He was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans by the President of Slovenia for his work with the Slovene-based Peace and Sarajevo Committees of PEN International. He has received Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, and two Witter-Bynner fellowships, a Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award, and the Crazyhorse prize. He’s won five Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best American Poems ’97 as well as many other anthologies. Originator of VCFA’s Slovenia Program, he was a Fulbright Exchange poet to former Yugoslavia and returns to Europe each year with groups of students. He has been teaching at the Iowa Summer Festival, The Prague Summer Program, and regularly at UT-Chattanooga (since 1976), where he directs the Meacham Writers’ Conference. He has taught at VCFA since 1987. He has won teaching awards at UT-Chattanooga and VCFA. In 2009 he won the AWP George Garret Award for teaching and writing.
Richard Katrovas is founding director of the Prague Summer Program. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, among them Dithyrambs (Carnegie Mellon,1998), Prague Winter (Carnegie Mellon, 2004), Scorpio Rising: Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 2011) and the forthcoming Swastika to Lotus (Carnegie Mellon). He is also the author of a book of short stories, Prague, U.S.A. (Portals, 1997); a memoir, The Republic of Burma Shave (Carnegie Mellon, 2001); a novel, Mystic Pig (Smallmouth, 2001, Oleander, 2008); and the “anecdotal memoir” The Years of Smashing Bricks (Carnegie Mellon, 2007). His most recent book is the memoir-in-essays Raising Girls in Bohemia: Meditations of an American Father (Three Room Press, New York: 2014). His poems, essays and stories have appeared widely, and won numerous grants and awards. He was editor for Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution: Voices from the Czech Republic (New Orleans Review, Special Double Issue, Spring, 2000). Katrovas witnessed the Velvet Revolution on a Fulbright in 1989, and has been a resident of Prague with his three daughters and yogini wife for much of each year since. He taught for the University of New Orleans for twenty years, and joined the faculty of Western Michigan University in the fall of 2002.
Anne Marie Macari is the author of four books of poetry, including Red Deer (Persea Books, 2015) and She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008). In 2000 Macari won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, which was followed by Gloryland (Alice James Books, 2005). She has also coedited, with Carey Salerno, Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry From Alice James Books.
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His latest prose book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles travels in Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
Stanley Plumly’s most recent book of poems is Orphan Hours (W.W. Norton, 2012). His collection, Old Heart, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography was runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Distinguished Biography. His most recent book of prose, The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb W.W. Norton, 2014), won the 2015 Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, administered by the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Plumly is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. In 2010 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including, most recently, Divine Nothingness (Norton, 2014) and In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. A kind-of memoir of a year in 85 sections titled Stealing History, was published by Trinity University Press in 2012. Stern was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets, was the 2010 recipient of the Medal of Honor in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he was inducted into the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. He was the 2014 winner of the Frost Medal.
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