November 14th: Alice Notley in conversation with Lee Ann Brown
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Alice Notley will discuss her new book Telling the Truth As It Comes Up with Lee Ann Brown.
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Tuesday, November 14th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. The discussion will also be streamed and archived directly to this page.
Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 by Alice Notley (The Song Cave, 2023)
One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than forty books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they’re for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley’s observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.
Alice Notley was born in 1945 in Brisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California, in the Mojave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, at Barnard College, and at The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, receiving an MFA in Fiction and Poetry from the latter. For sixteen years, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School. Notley is the author of more than forty books of poetry, including At Night the States, the double volume Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère, and How Spring Comes, which was a co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Award. Her epic poem The Descent of Alette was published by Penguin in 1996, followed by Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Over the years Notley edited or co-edited three poetry journals: CHICAGO, SCARLET, and Gare du Nord. In 2015 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize, for lifetime achievement in poetry.
Lee Ann Brown is a poet and singer of neo-hymns and ballads. Her books include Polyverse (Sun & Moon, 1999), In the Laurels, Caught (Fence, 2013) and a collaborative song cycle, The Thirteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time. Brown was born in Japan in 1963 and was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Brown University for both graduate and undergraduate degrees in Literature and Creative Writing, and is now active in the New York City poetry worlds as performer, editor, educator and curator at venues like Torn Page and others. She held a recent Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, teaches at St. John’s University and runs Tender Buttons Press which emphasizes work by women and other gender expansive beings.