Word of Mouth Success!

The Word of Mouth Fun(draiser) at the Redstar Bar in down town Baton Rouge was a huge success! Thank you to everyone for coming out and showing support for the Delta Mouth and The New Delta Review-- and a special thanks to Redstar Bar, Polly Pry, DJ Twenty*Six, and RMONIC.

We couldn't have done it with out you!

Featured Reader: Laurie Lynn Drummond

Laurie Lynn Drummond’s collection of linked stories, Anything You Say Can and Will be Used Against You (HarperCollins 2004), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and won the Best Book Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers’ League of Texas, and has been translated into Finnish, Japanese, and French. A story from her collection, “Something About a Scar,” won the 2005 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Her fiction has appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, New Delta Review, Story, New Virginia Review, Black Warrior Review, and Fiction. Her essays, several of which have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited in Best American Essays, have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and River Teeth. A recipient of a 2008 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction, she is working on a memoir, Losing My Gun, and a novel, Memories of the Living, Lives of the Dead. A former police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Drummond received her MFA from LSU in 1991. She now teaches fiction and memoir in the MFA Program at the University of Oregon, where she also directs the Kidd Tutorial Program.

Featured Reader: Susana Chavez-Silverman

Susana Chávez-Silverman is professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Pomona College in California. She is coeditor of Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad and Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture. Her latest book Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters will be out in March 2010

Chávez-Silverman grew up (at least) bilingually and biculturally between Los Angeles, Madrid and Guadalajara, México, the daughter of a Jewish Hispanist and a Chicana teacher. Her book, Killer Crónicas:Bilingual Memories, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. This collection of chronicles began in 2001, after Susana was awarded a fellowship by the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project on contemporary Argentine women's poetry. She spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires where, in addition to research and writing on her official (academic) book, she began to send bilingual, punning "letters from the southern [cone] front" to colleagues and friends by email.

Featured Reader: Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines is a contemporary poet, playwright, and scholar whose work is on the cutting edge of poetry and theatre. She graduated suma cum laude from Barnard College and was a doctoral candidate in French from Columbia University. She is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks 2006) and Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar 2007). Two volumes of translation appeared in 2009: My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, for Mal-O-Mar, and The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal, by Jean-Luc Hennig, for Semiotext(e). In addition to her numerous conference appearances, Ms. Reines has contributed to coconut, Action! Yes Quarterly and tema celeste. TELEPHONE,her first play, was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre. TELEPHONEpremiered in February 2009; The New York Times called it 'inspired and utterly original'; it is forthcoming in 2009 in PLAY: A JOURNAL OF PLAYS.

In Spring 2009, Ms. Reines taught a class at UC Berkeley as Holloway Lecturer in Poetry. Several sources have referred to Ms. Reines as one of the “crucial voices in” our generation.

Featured Reader: Peggy Shinner

Peggy Shinner's stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Daedalus, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Bloom, River Styx, and others. One of her stories, “Jack’s Things, ” was selected as one of the 100 Distinguished Stories in the Best American Short Stories 2007. She's been awarded two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, several Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, and residencies at the Ucross and Ragdale Foundations. Currently, she's working on a book of essays about the body.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/fourth_genre_explorations_in_nonfiction/v009/9.1shinner.html

Featured Reader: Akilah Oliver

A poet, performer, and teacher, Akilah Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory, recipient of the PEN Beyond Margins Award, and her performance with collaborator Anne Waldman can be heard on the new CD, Matching Half.

Oliver has been artist-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles, was curator for the Poetry Project’s Monday Night Reading Series, co-founder of the avant-garde feminist performance group The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, and is on the faculty of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. A Toast in the House of Friends is dedicated to her son, Oluchi McDonald (1982-2003).

She currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Photo by
Theresa Hurst

Help Raise Funds for Delta Mouth 2010 Oct. 23 @ Redstar Bar

Red Star will join with The New Delta Review – the all graduate student-run literary magazine out of Louisiana State University – on Friday, October 23, 2009 in hosting “Word of Mouth: An Evening of Music, Drinks and Fun(draising).”

The New Delta Review aims to raise $800 or more to support Delta Mouth Literary and Music festival. Last year, Delta Mouth brought together 30 regional and national writers and artists for a weekend of music, readings, and art exhibits. This year’s event hopes to continue expanding Baton Rouge’s literary arts community by bringing even more national writers in connection with writers and artist from the local area. Delta Mouth is scheduled for Thursday and Friday, February 11 & 12, 2010.

The event will start at 9:00 PM at Red Star bar located at 222 Laurel Street downtown Baton Rouge. Come show your support for the literary arts in Baton Rouge!

Delta Mouth Festival 2010

This year's Delta Mouth Literary Festival is set for

Thursday & Friday, February 11th and 12th, 2010

Featured readers will be announced soon!