Jubilant Thicket at Head House Books

In-store readings the second Sunday of each month at 5pm

Jubilant Thicket emphasizes poetry as an art in itself and in relation to all other types of art. Each monthly event features a poet from the Philadelphia area, another poet from outside the city, and an artist of another kind.

Tuesday, November 8, 2015

Tamara Oakman’s fiction and poetry has been published in Painted Bride QuarterlyMany Mountains MovingPhiladelphia Stories and Best of Philadelphia Stories AnthologyMad Poets Review, and other online and in-print magazines. She has awards in poetry, fiction, memoir, and drama. She has completed her MA in Humanities thesis and has an MA in English from Arcadia University. She teaches English and writing at universities in Philadelphia and neighboring areas. As a scholar, she studied Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Sexton in Boston and studied abroad in Italy, France, and Belize. She has served as a judge for many creative writing contests. She has hosted, created, and coordinated events, series, workshops, and festivals and has served as an editor for multiple anthologies. She has contributed to literary panels and was featured on WHYY-TV and PhillyCAM. She is also co-founder and co-editor of APIARY magazine. Find out what the buzz is all about at apiarymagazine.com.

Violet LeVoit is a writer and film critic whose work has appeared in numerous film, horror and bizarro anthologies. She is the Magazine,.author of the short short story collections  I Am Genghis Cum (2011) and I'll Fuck Anything that Moves and Stephen Hawking (2014), both from Fungasm Press. Her film criticism has appeared in the Baltimore City Paper, PressPlay.com, TurnerClassicMovies.com, FilmThreat,com, Allmovie.com, and THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK: MOVIES (Cassell Illustrated) among others. Originally from Baltimore, she now lives in Philadelphia.

Mel Bentley co-organizes Housework at Chapterhouse, a reading series in Philadelphia, and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Temple University. Obstacle, Particle, Spectacle was released from 89plus/Luma Foundation. Chapbooks &parts and Stub Wilderness were released from Damask Press and Well Greased Press, respectively. Mel’s work has appeared in Boog City, Fact-Simile, small po[r]tions, Elderly, Bedfellows, NO INFINITE, and Poems in a Room, a small collection released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name.

 

March 9, 2014

Warren Longmire's work has appeared in Pax Americana, Certain Circuits, The New Purlieu Review and two chapbooks: Ripped Winters and Do.Until.True. He is a poetry editor for Apiary Magazine, a founding member of the UPenn Excelano Spoken Word Collective and a frequent Philly rep in national slam competitions. When pried from his second life as a obsessive computer programmer, he can be found making abrupt pauses and wild hand gestures in poetry venues throughout the tri-state area.

Gina Myers is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013) and A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009), as well as numerous chapbooks. Originally from Saginaw, Michigan, she now lives in Atlanta, where she helps run the What’s New in Poetry? series at Emory University.

Jacob (Goby) Russell, in his own words: It’s easier to talk about my visual art than my poems, because I don’t have to. I can talk about process instead. Maybe that’s not so different for poems. Things of mind, or things of the sensual world: a swirl of dust and leaves in a parking lot, a vanishing storm, bits of rusted steel, cigarette butts, shattered mirrors. Colors. Shapes. ModPodge & nails. 
Pieces of things, in being broken, lose their names. Assemblages become images of process in transition, things no longer what they were, but not yet what they will become: a new reality, a promise of possible renewal, a revelation that may or may not happen. When I’m working on a piece of art I feel suspended in time and expectation. Not where I was. Not yet where I will be. I think of poems that way too. Their strongesw t reality is not what they are, but a kind of emptiness, a space they create in this too solid reality, and the anticipation that wakens in us when we gaze into nothing at all. The art and poetry of erasure. That is what I aspire to.
My poems and fiction have appeared in various publications. You can find links to them, and images of my art, on my blog, 
Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog.

 

February 2014 

A native of California, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Key West Literary Seminar. She's also received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Diana's poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Phantom Limb, Memorious, The Collagist, Lana Turner, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Susan Barr-Toman’s debut novel, When Love Was Clean Underwear, was selected by Ann Hood as the winner of the Many Voices Project Fiction Prize. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Susan’s work has been published in Philadelphia Stories, Literary Mama, and r.kv.r.y. Quarterly Literary Magazine. Her short story “Town Watch” was recently anthologized in South Philly Fiction. Visit Susan at susanbarrtoman.com for more information.

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Advice for Loversgowanus atropolis and co-editor, with E. Tracy Grinnell and erica kaufman, of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards. Julian lives in Brooklyn, New York, and plays country music with Juan & the Pines. New work is on the blog Herm Of Warsaw.

 

October 2013

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an associate professor of creative writing at Stockton College and a former Kundiman fellow. Her books include People Are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus, 2010) and Manifest (Switchback, 2013). Her poems and reviews have appeared this year in Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, diode, and horse less review. Her radio show The Last Word for 91.7 WLFR Pomona NJ contributes a podcast regularly to The Conversant. She splits her time between the East Coast and Kentucky.

Mytili Jagannathan listens to the notion that “every letter is an alphabet,” making poems that investigate public and private space, power, gender, property, desire, collectivity, and the conditions of speech. She is the author of Acts, a chapbook from Habenicht Press. Her poems have appeared in Sous Rature, EOAGH, Rattapallax, Mirage#4/Period[ical], Combo, Fanzine, Interlope, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She’s currently dreaming up film/poetry collaborations with filmmaker Sara Zia Ebrahimi, which so far has yielded the short Up Against (also in collaboration with electronic musician Gralin Hughes) for the “Shelter” episode of the Termite TV Collective.

Robert Ostrom is the author of The Youngest Butcher in Illinois. He lives in Queens and teaches at the City University of New York and Columbia University.

 

August 2013

Travis Macdonald is a poet, copywriter, editor and maker of books. His most recently released work includes: Title Bout, BAR/koans, Hoop Cores, Sight & Sigh, N7ostradamus, Basho's Phonebook and The O Mission Repo [vol. 1].

Michael Basinski is Curator of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo. He performs his work as a solo poet and in ensemble with BuffFluxus. Among his recent books of poetry are Piglittuce, Learning Poem About Learning About Being A Poet, and Trailers. His poems and other works have appeared in many magazines including Dandelion, BoxKite, Antennae, Open Letter, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, First Offense, Terrible Work, Kenning, Lungfull, Tinfish, Score, Unarmed, Rampike, House Organ, Ferrum Wheel, End Note, Ur Vox, Damn the Caesars, Pilot, 1913, Filling Station, fhole, Public Illumination, Eccolinguist, Western Humanities Review, Big Bridge, Mimeo Mimeo, Nerve Lantern, Vanitas, Talisman, Yellow Field, and Poetry.

Eleanor Goudie-Averill, a 2007 MFA Dance Performance graduate of the University of Iowa, currently dances for Group Motion and Tori Lawrence + Co. in Philadelphia. Since 2007 she has directed the Stone Depot Dance Lab, a collaborative team of artists whose mission is to create honest and experiential dances. Her choreography has been shown in New York City at DNA’s RAW Material, Movement Research at the Judson Church, White Wave Festivals, and Triskelion Arts; in Philadelphia at The A.W.A.R.D. Show!, Group Motion’s Spiel Uhr, CHI MAC’s INhale Series, Norristown Dance Festival, and Philly Fringe 2010–12; and throughout the Midwest. Ellie enjoys teaching dance to people of all ages and currently teaches at Temple University, Philly PARD, Wissahickon Dance Academy and the CHI Movement Arts Center. She also performs with Movement Brigade, Chisena Danza and SCRAP Performance Group and has danced with the Bowery Dancers, Kayle & Company, MacArthur Dance Project and Daara Dance. She began her training at Ballet Midwest in Topeka, Kansas, holds a BFA in dance from the University of Kansas, and has served as Visiting Professor of Ballet at Bucknell University and Artistic Director of the UI Youth Ballet.