Halloween Poetic/Performance Bash: Philly: 10/31/08

Friday, October 31, 9 PM: Robin's Bookstore (108 S 13th St, Philadelphia) presents the first annual Halloween Poetic/Performance Bash BLAM! Poetic Arts Performance Project, featuring
Hal Sirowitz, Bob Holman, CA Conrad, Adam Meora, Rick Szybowski.

Produced by Adam Meora; hosted by Debra Morkun & Adam Meora.

$10 cover includes candy. Part of the proceeds go to Philabundance.

Costume Dance Party to follow.

Rick Szybowski was born on October 23, 1975, hasn't died yet and lives to compose, teach and perform music.

Adam Meora is the founder of Poetic Arts and Performance Project, a project based in Philly to bring a home to the poetic/collaborative/activist arts and to be housed at the University City Arts League beginning in November. The Poetic Arts Project's goal is to promote the poetic arts while raising money for charities and performing outreach in our community. He has been featured for his poetic performance in Philadelphia at the Tin Angel, Robin's Bookstore, Green Line Cafe, Milk Boy Cafe, Blue Marble Books and more. He has recently been published in The Bathroom, The Fridge Door, The Mad Poets Journal and has work upcoming in The Fox Chase Review. He is managing editor for NakedHowl.com, an online literary journal. Bob Holman said about his poetry performance, "He broke all rules of decorum." He plans to show off his hairy chest at this reading too. He is also known as DJ Naked Meora.

CA Conrad's childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped to Philadelphia the first chance he got where he lives and writes today with The PhillySound poets. Soft Skull Press published his book Deviant Propulsion in 2006. Jack Kimball's FAUX Press recently published his new series of poems (Soma)tic Midge (samples from this new work can be seen in listenlight, MiPOesias, Sawbuck and COCONUT#9). The Book of Frank is forthcoming in late 2008 from CHAX Press. A selection of The Book of Frank was translated into German by Berlin poet Holger, and a bilingual chapbook is now available from Carrie Hunter's YPOLITA Press. A collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems, will be coming out in early 2009 from Factory School Press.

Bob Holman - Recently dubbed a member of the "Poetry Pantheon" by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Holman has previously been crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" (New York Daily News), "Poetry Czar" (Village Voice), "Dean of the Scene" (Seventeen), and "this generation’s Ezra Pound," (San Francisco's Poetry Flash). From Slam to Hiphop, from performance poetry to spoken word, Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry in our culture. The series he produced for PBS, The United States of Poetry, features over sixty poets including Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Reed and former President Jimmy Carter, as well as rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign Language poets, and Slammers. USOP lives on as an anthology from Harry Abrams Publishers (in its second printing), a home video from KQED, and soundtrack CD from Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman co-founded. He has appeared widely on TV: "Nightline," "Good Morning America," "ABC News Magazine," MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged," and "The Charlie Rose Show," among others. The NEA has announced major preproduction support for his new poetry media project, the World of Poetry, worldofpoetry.org, the world's first digital poetry anthology.

Hal Sirowitz is the recipient of a Frederick Delius Award and The Susan Rose Recording Grant for Contemporary Jewish Music. Hal Sirowitz is the author of three books of poems, including Mother Said, My Therapist Said (Crown). Mother Said will be released on CD with music composed by Alla Borzova, sung by Paul Sperry. John Flansburgh of the rock group, They Might Be Giants, has recorded him for Hello Records, and the group spoke about him during their Mother's Day interview for NPR's Studio 360. Garrison Keillor has read his work on NPR's Writer's Almanac. Sirowitz has performed on MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS's Poetry Heaven, and NPR's All Things Considered. Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a 2003 New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Sirowitz is also the best selling translated poet in Norway, where Mother Said has been adapted for the stage and has been made into animated cartoons. Hal is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He has a poem in Garrison Keillor's anthology, Good Poems, in Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast (W.W. Norton), in Poetry After 9/11 (Melville House Publishing) and in 110 Stories: Writers Respond to 9/11 (NYU Press). He worked for 25 years as a special education teacher for the New York City public schools. Hal is married to the writer Mary Minter Krotzer.