Main Street Rag Publishing Co Reading & Open Mic Series: Ruth Moose & David T. Manning

Thursday

04/08/10  7:00pm-8:00pm

Main Street Rag Publishing Co Reading & Open Mic Series (every 2^nd  Thursday)

Featured Readers: Ruth Moose & David T. Manning

Main Street Rag Publishing Company have joined together  as the newest location for the Main Street Rag Reading Series.  Every Second Thursday at 7pm, co-hosts Debra Kaufman and Stan Absher will start the evening by introducing two of our authors as featured readers, followed by an Open Mic.  Readers, writers and appreciators of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction are invited to join in.

The Main Street Rag Publishing Company, a bindery and a publisher based in Charlotte, has published a quarterly print magazine since 1996. Among its features are poetry, short fiction, photography and graphic images, essays, interviews, reviews, cartoons and commentary.  MSR also publishes poetry through their annual chapbook and full-length poetry collection contests.  They also help writers self-publish their works; from design, layout and printing to shipping the books out.

Ruth Moose will read from her new collection of poetry The Librarian.  Ruth has been on the faculty of the Dept of English at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1996. She has published 2 collections of short stories, 4 books of poetry. Individual stories appeared in Atlantic, Redbook, Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review and other places. Her work has been included in several anthologies, including Stories about Teachers and Teaching. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Yankee, Christian Science Monitor and other places. Most recently she was awarded a Chapman Fellowship to compile a work on North Carolina writers.  

“Ruth Moose is first and always a storyteller, and in Making the Bed she tells us the stories of a life in terms of fairy tales, memories, and different beds: marriage beds, birth beds, Penelope’s bed, single beds, death beds. Her spare lyrical language dramatizes the search for significant acts, the spark of connections made.”   --Robert Morgan

David Treadway Manning will read from his new collection of poems The Flower Sermon.   A California native, Davod received his Ph.D. in chemistry at Caltech, during which a required literature course introduced him to T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. Following a 44-year career as an industrial organic chemist he began a second life as a poet. A member of the North Carolina Poetry Society, he won its Poet Laureate Award in 1996, 1998 and 2006. Dave is the current host of the Friday Noon Poets of Chapel Hill and serves on the board of the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Pushcart nominee, his poems have appeared in Free Lunch, Main Street Rag, New Orleans Review, Pembroke Magazine, 32 Poems Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review and other journals. He has five chapbooks: Negotiating Physics and Other Poems (1999) and Poets Anonymous (2001), The Ice-Carver (2004), winner of the Longleaf Chapbook Competition, Out After Dark (2003) and Detained by the Authorities (2007).  Dave and his wife Doris live in Cary, North Carolina.

“What a range of subject matter David Manning's The Flower Sermon illuminates! And yet this collection is strongly bonded together by themes that join, combine and recombine in constellations of bright thought and profound emotion--and the whole is charged with a delighted wonderment.  Here is one of the most engaging volumes of poetry I have ever come across.” – Fred Chappell