An Evening of Reading, co-sponsored by Watchword Press and the Independent Press Association, hosts readings by local authors

Tuesday, March 29th, 7PM
An Evening of Reading, co-sponsored by Watchword Press and the Independent Press Association, hosts readings by local authors Mirela Ramona Ciupag, Gene Tanta, Simone Muench, Pennie Brinson and Patricia Guy.
 
Chicago? In an effort to extend literary communities across state borders, and to bring independent publishing into the spotlight, Oakland based literary magazine Watchword is making the rounds, and will be hosting an event co-sponsored with the Independent Press Association this month at Quimby?s Books with two extraordinary local magazines, Poetry Magazine and the Journal of Ordinary Thought. Local writers Pennie Brinson, Mirela Ramona Ciupag, Patricia Guy, Simone Muench and Gene Tanta will be presented by their editors at 7PM on Tuesday, March 29th at Quimby?s in Chicago.
 
Watchword, the literary magazine published bi-annually by Watchword Press, has been presenting and disseminating new writing and modern translations to a wide audience since its founding in 2000
 
The Independent Press Association of Chicago is a group of community, ethnic, and other independent publications dedicated to helping each other accomplish our goals, strengthen our communities, and advance social justice. The steering committee and advisory council of IPA-Chicago include The Chicago Reporter, In These Times, The North Lawndale Community News, PISTIL Magazine, Residents’ Journal, Punk Planet, and the Journal of Ordinary Thought. The organization?s program for 2005 includes workshops, networking, and publishing a directory of the Chicago area?s community, ethnic, and independent press.
 
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, POETRY Magazine is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Harriet Monroe?s ?Open Door? policy, set forth in Volume I of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of POETRY?s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented?often for the first time?works by virtually every significant poet of the 20th century.
 
The Journal of Ordinary Thought (JOT), published quarterly by the Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA), features writing by adults participating in community-based writing workshops in Chicago. JOT publishes reflections people make on their personal histories and everyday experiences. It is founded on the proposition that Every Person Is a Philosopher and expressing one?s thoughts fosters creativity and change. The Journal of Ordinary Thought is a vehicle for reflection, communication, and change.
 
Reading at this event will be:
 
Pennie Brinson (JOT) has been attending the Journal of Ordinary Thought (JOT) workshops at the Mabel Manning Branch Library since the spring of 1999. Brinson has been writing poetry and short stories since she was a child. She is currently working on a novel to be titled, Rosa Lee, and her fourth chapbook of prose titled Gloria, and Other Women. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and also freelances for Residents? Journal. Her first love is reading and writing poetry. Brinson has an Associates Degree in Liberal Arts.
 
Mirela Ramona Ciupag (WATCHWORD) holds a BA in Philosophy from University Alexandru I. Cuza, Iasi, Romania. She was a philosophy teacher and a theater director when in 1999 she came to America as an ArtsLink program fellow in Poetry and as a guest of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. More recently, she won Curator?s Choice award at Chicago’s 2002 Around the Coyote Arts Festival. Her poems as well as her translations were published in Iasi, Romania Outpost, in San Francisco Watchword, and in Chicago Another Chicago Magazine and Court Green.
 
Patricia Guy (JOT) Tricia is a woman in her forties who has experienced her share of grief and heartache?Patricia Guy started with Journal of Ordinary Thought (JOT) in 1996, at the first meeting at the Hall Branch Library at 48th and Michigan. Since then, Guy has appeared in many issues of JOT. She co-led a group at the Fisk Elementary School (with parents) and moved from the Hall Branch Library writing group to start her own at the King Branch Library. Guy now leads the West Englewood Branch Library writing workshop. ?Tricia is a fresh thought. She knows that the first answer is not always the best?
 
Simone Muench (POETRY) is poetry editor of ACM. She was raised in Benson, Louisiana and Combs, Arkansas before moving to Colorado to receive her BA and MA from the University of Colorado. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Paris Review, Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Bellingham Review and Pool. One of her poems will appear in Iowa Press’s upcoming Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave and Virgil Suarez. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Charles Goodnow Award, the AWP Intro Journals Project Award and the Poetry Center’s 9th Annual Juried Reading Award. Her book The Air Lost in Breathing received the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry and was published by Helicon Nine in 2000. New Michigan Press released her chapbook Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum in 2003. She was one of the Fine Lines Poetry Contest winners co-sponsored by Olay and the Poetry Society of America, and judged by Sonia Sanchez, Sapphire, Lee Ann Brown, Marilyn Chin, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and Jill Bialosky. Recently, her manuscript Drowning by the Light of Oranges, aka Lampblack and Ash, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry from Sarabande Books. It will appear sometime in 2005.
 
Gene Tanta (Eugen Tinta) (WATCHWORD) was born in Timisoara, Romania, 1974 and arrived with his family in Chicago in 1984. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and translates contemporary Romanian poetry. His poems, visual works, and translation have been published and exhibited nationally and internationally: Epoch, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review. Two collaborative poems with Reginald Shepherd are forthcoming in Indiana Review.
 
Watchword Press: www.watchwordpress.org
Poetry Magazine: www.poetrymagazine.org
Journal of Ordinary Thought: www.jot.org
IPA Chicago: www.indypress.org