Belladonna is a reading series that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, dangerous with language.

Friday, December 5, 2003, 7PM at
Bluestockings Activist Bookstore
(Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington)
A $7-10 donation is suggested.

Leslie Scalapino, Susan Briante, Jen Benka

Susan Briant's poems appear in TriQuarterly, POOL, The Brooklyn Rail and Quarter After Eight, among others and are forthcoming in anthologies by the University of Iowa Press and Coracle Press (Dublin). Briante is the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at the University of Texas. Her essay “Hotel de México” won the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest for Non-Fiction.

Jen Benka has received grants from the Poetry/Film Workshop, Xeric Foundation, and Intermedia Arts, was awarded a 2001 Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and nominated for an Eisner Award for her serial graphic novel, Manya. She co-organizes NYC's annual marathon reading of Emily Dickinson's complete poems (www.emilyreading.com) and is the managing director of Poets & Writers. Her collection of one poem for each word in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution was published earlier this year by BOOKLYN as an artist book.

Leslie Scalapino's most recent books include: a novel/poem/hybrid text, Dahlia’s Iris — Secret Autobiography and Fiction, 2003, FC2 a fiction press. And Scalapino’s autobiography with a poem, titled Zither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Scalapino has about twenty-three books of poetry, fiction, plays and essays. Poetry books include: New Time (Wesleyan University Press); It’s go in/quiet illumined grass/land (Post-Apollo Press); The Tango (Granary Books); way and that they were at the beach (both North Point Press, available from O Books thru SPD). Fiction include: Defoe (Sun & Moon, reprinted by Green Integer); The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion/A Trilogy (North Point Press, reprinted by Talisman Publishers); Orchid Jetsam (Tuumba). Hybrid texts (fiction/essay/poetry at once): The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence (Wesleyan); R-hu (Atelos); How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Potes & Poets). Scalapino teaches at Bard College in the summer MFA program; has taught at Mills College in Oakland, San Francisco Art Institute, Otis Art Institute in L.A., UCSD, Naropa. She is the editor and publisher of O Books.