Bianca Stone's The Black House Launch at Unnameable Books, Turners Falls, MA - Nov. 3

We’re headed back to the Valley! Join us for a celebration of the release of Bianca Stone’s The Black House Nov. 3, 6pm at Unnameable Books in Turners Falls, MA. The event will feature readings by Bianca Stone and Dara Barrois/Dixon, a short film, and a Q&A with the author. We’ll also be on hand to sell the remaining copies of The Black House.

What: The Black House Launch Party and Reading by Bianca Stone, with special guest Dara Barrois/Dixon

Where: Unnameable Books, 66 Avenue A, Turners Falls, Massachusetts 01376

When: Nov. 3, 6pm

This will be our second-ever event in Western Massachusetts—and a rare event outside of Buffalo, New York—following the release of Emma Fuchs’s Ralph Angel Poetry Prize-winning broadside “Sestina for Klein Blue” at Northampton’s Iconica Social Club last spring. We hope to see some familiar faces!

Julianne Neely Presents "Deepfake Translation Poems" at Artpark Bridges Festival Aug. 19

Artpark Bridges Festival to Celebrate Community Connections

(Lewiston, New York)—Artpark has announced a new festival celebrating its connections to the Western New York community and visiting artists from around the world. Free and open to the public on August 19th, the Artpark Bridges Festival will highlight ongoing collaboration with community groups and organizations including People, Inc., Empower WNY, Buffalo Parkinsons, and Artisans Edge, along with new work created by the artists and groups in residence at Artpark this summer, including Jon Lehrer Dance Company, David Glass, Plasticiens Volants, and poets and writers.

As part of the Artpark Bridges Festival, Foundlings Press and Carrowduff Arts will present a special production of Julianne Neely’s “Deepfake Translation Poems,” an audiovisual installation inspired by Katie Holten’s “The Language of Trees” workshops at Artpark earlier this summer and designed for a one-day-only debut at Artpark’s Gallery building. “Deepfake Translation Poems” will run from 4:20-5:20pm.

“Artpark was founded on the principle that public art is a public good, and the belief that our natural surroundings in Western New York power experiences that could only happen here," said Artpark President Sonia Clark. "We’re proud to welcome everyone to experience and celebrate the Artpark Bridges program, which reaches out into the community and ensures that all have access to our extraordinary setting and the art created and performed here every day.”

Artpark’s Amphitheater above the Niagara River Gorge.

Residents Perform New Work

Many of the performances on August 19 will include work that resident artists and groups developed in partnership with Artpark Bridges and participating organizations. 

• Jon Lehrer Dance Company will present a new work developed in partnership with the local Parkinson’s community initiated through Artpark Bridges’ ongoing relationship with the Parkinson’s Foundation. Performed on the beautiful new outdoor Grove Stage, this performance will also include favorites from JLDC’s world-renowned repertory

• David Glass, a UK-based theater artist, in collaboration with Sketchbook Theatre, will present work resulting from “Alchemy of the Extraordinary,” a devised theater and creative practice workshop for professional actors and open to public. 

• Poet and Literary Resident Robert Giannetti and Artpark Bridges Director Cynthia Pegado will present new work based on “Sensing Resonance,” a series of outdoor poetry and performance workshops that welcomed the general public and members of our WNY community writing from perspectives of sight impairment, progressive neurological disease, or mental health wellness challenges, in collaboration with local human service agencies. 

• Julianne Neely, a poet from Artpark’s inaugural literary residency, will debut an audiovisual installation, “Deepfake Translation Poems,” inspired by Katie Holten’s Language of Trees and Tree Workshop, created this summer to be performed at The Gallery at Artpark. This production is co-presented by Foundlings Press and Carrowduff Arts in collaboration with Artpark.

• The artistic team of the French company Plasticiens Volants, a 47-year-old performance troupe based in Tolouse, France, in residence at Artpark during this week, will discuss their create process toward a new production conceived in partnership with the Seneca Art and Cultural Center of the Ganondagan, Artpark and Rochester Fringe Festival. 

• Katerina Seda, a conceptual and social artist from the Czech Republic presented at Artpark by Claire Schneider’s CS1 Cultural Projects will discuss her new work.

Artpark will announce the complete schedule of performances soon. Limited food and drink will be available from the concessions stand by the parking lot. For more information, visit:

https://www.artpark.net/events/artpark-bridges-festival

Foundlings author and Artpark 2023 Resident Poet Julianne Neely

Foundlings Books by Julianne Neely:

Strays Pack Four: Ruefle, Neely, Toarmino

Ralph Angel Reading in Northampton, MA

On Friday, April 22, we held our first-ever Ralph Angel Reading at Iconica Social Club in Northampton, Massachusetts, marking the release of the Talia Ryan-designed broadside of “Sestina for Klein Blue” by Emma Fuchs, winner of the 2022 Ralph Angel Poetry Prize. This also happened to be the first Foundlings event outside of the Buffalo area since our participation in the Frank Stanford Festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas in September 2018.

Readers Emma Fuchs, Elle Longpre, and Lucy Wainger entranced the audience with new and old work and had books available for purchase—including Elle’s How to Keep You Alive and Lucy’s In Life There Are Many Things. It was a beautiful night and a great way to remember Ralph, whose heart and spirit flow through this prize and reading series.

Some “Sestina for Klein Blue” broadsides are still available. Order yours in our online bookstore.

Ralph Angel Reading Featuring Emma Fuchs - April 21, Northampton, MA

Ralph Angel Poetry Prize winner Emma Fuchs will join Foundlings in Northampton, MA for a reading celebrating the release of “Sestina for Klein Blue,” Fuchs’s prize-winning poem, now a limited-edition broadside designed by artist Talia Ryan. The reading and broadside launch at Iconica Social Club will include performances by Emma Fuchs, Elle Longpre, and Lucy Wainger.

What to know:

• Readers Emma Fuchs (Ralph Angel Poetry Prize Winner, 2022), Elle Longpre, and Lucy Wainger

• Iconica Social Club, 1 Amber Ln, Northampton, MA 01060

• Friday, April 21, 2023 at 6:30pm

• Limited-edition “Sestina for Klein Blue” broadsides available

We hope to see you there!

Watch Strays on Stage: Full Video

Julianne Neely and Rachelle Toarmino Live in Conversation; Recorded Reading by Mary Ruefle

On Saturday June 26, 2021, Foundlings Press launched Strays Pack 4 at the North Park Theatre in Buffalo, New York.

The event featured live readings and conversation from poets Julianne Neely and Rachelle Toarmino, plus a surprise recorded performance by Strays 4 packmate Mary Ruefle.

All three poets read from their Strays chapbooks (available for purchase here). Seated on the North Park’s historic stage and beneath the theatre’s golden dome, Neely and Toarmino also discussed each other’s work, the sonnet form and “broken sonnets,” repetition and punctuation, influences, “confessional” poetry, readings and misreadings of contemporary women poets, MFA and PhD programs and workshops, and their experiences reading and studying with Mary Ruefle.

Watch here:

Note: Reading starts at 8:59. Aidan’s introduction and Rachelle’s reading are difficult to hear due to mic placement and acoustics issues. Audio quality picks up during Julie’s reading; the discussion and Mary’s reading are entirely audible.

Gallery

Strays on Stage: Foundlings Press Presents Poetry at the North Park Theatre

Poets Julianne Neely and Rachelle Toarmino Reading Live with Virtual Guest Mary Ruefle

In-person poetry events return to Buffalo on Saturday, June 26, as the North Park Theatre hosts Foundlings Press and poets Julianne Neely, Rachelle Toarmino, and Mary Ruefle. The event—“Strays on Stage”—will feature live readings and conversation from Neely and Toarmino along with a recorded reading from virtual guest Ruefle.

Doors will open at 11 a.m. and the event will start promptly at 11:30 a.m. Guests will clear the building by 1:30 p.m. so that the North Park can begin its afternoon and evening programming. Copies of Strays Pack 4 and other Foundlings titles will be available—as will the North Park’s famous real-butter popcorn and other concessions.

“We’re thrilled to be bringing live poetry back to Buffalo with our friends at the North Park,” said Aidan Ryan, publisher of Foundlings Press. It’s incredible to reflect that just two months ago this would have been unthinkable. But now that it’s safe to gather in groups, we’re going big—big voices, the big stage, big buckets of buttery popcorn.”

“Mary, Julie, and Rachelle are some of today’s leading poets—a living legend, two celebrated innovators, and three dear friends of the press,” Foundlings editor in chief Max Crinnin added. “In addition to powerful new poems, I expect a scintillating conversation that will leave us all with much to think about for weeks to come.”

Strays on Stage celebrates the fourth release of Strays, a beloved series of limited-edition micro-publications from Foundlings Press. Each pack, hand-bound in Buffalo, features original work by three poets. Pack 4 features collections by Ruefle, Neely, and Toarmino. Pack 5, available for pre-order in December, will feature Derrick Austin, Jessica Fjeld, and Nicholas Rattner translating the Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román. Previous contributors have included Kazim Ali, Ralph Angel, Ramón García, Jakob Maier, Andrew Grace, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Robin Lee Jordan, Richard Jackson, and Ata Moharreri. Strays Packs 4 and 5 are supported in part through the New York State Council on the Arts and its DEC Grant program, administered locally by Arts Services Initiative (ASI). 

Register for the event.

Pre-order Strays Pack 4.

About the poets

Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD student and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and more.

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Rachelle Toarmino is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Sundress Publications, P-Queue, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag and currently serves as the assistant managing editor of jubilat. She lives between Buffalo and Western Massachusetts, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst.

About Foundlings Press

Foundlings Press is a literary publishing partnership based in Buffalo, New York. Foundlings earned a reputation as a pint-sized poetry powerhouse with the publication of the feted Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford (2018), a seminal anthology with over 30 contributors; and for Strays, an ongoing series of micro-publications that brings together work in packs featuring three poets twice annually. The press has also developed a robust catalog of full-length books of poetry and chapbooks. Foundlings holds a biennial chapbook contest that pairs the winning poet with a guest artist and book designer, and also facilitates the annual Ralph Angel Poetry Prize, honoring one poem with a limited edition broadside publication.

For more information or to place bulk orders, contact:

Aidan Ryan

publisher@foundlingspress.com 

Learn more at foundlingspress.com.

Blazes Launch: November 7 at Duende

Join Foundlings on Saturday, Nov. 7, 7pm at Duende’s outdoor Watu Cantina for a reading to celebrate the launch of Blazes, the debut collection by poet Zack Graboksy.

Guests can enjoy food and drink from the cantina and sit at an appropriate distance around the venue’s outdoor stage, south of downtown Buffalo and in the shadow of the grain silos. Zack—coming up from Carlisle, PA—will read from his new collection and copies of Blazes and other Foundlings titles will be available for purchase.

We’re requiring masks for anyone moving about the venue, and requesting them for seated guests who aren’t eating or drinking. We’ll also be following and enforcing the latest Erie County health guidelines and notifying guests of any changes to the same in the weeks and days leading up to our event.

Click here for more info about Blazes.

Click here to RSVP to the event.