Sunday, September 23, 7:00 p.m.

Rae Armantrout, Ben Doyle & Sandra Miller

@ Bridge Street Books

Rae Armantrout's most recent books are Next Life, from Wesleyan University Press, and Collected Prose, from Singing Horse Press. She was born in Vallejo, California on 13 April 1947 and grew up in San Diego. Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, she later recieved a master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1975. Armantrout is also the author of Extremities, The Invention of Hunger, Precedence, Necroromance, Made to Seem, Writing the Plot about Sets, True (a memoir), The Pretext, and Veil: New and Selected Poems. A founding member of the West Coast "Language Poetry" movement, Armantrout worked closely with a dynamic group of writers including Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Steve Benson, Barrett Watten, Tom Mandel, and Carla Harryman. Although Language poetry can be seen as advocating a poetics of nonreferentiality, Armantrout's work, focusing as it often does on the local and the domestic, resists such definitions. Internationally known, Armantrout's work has been the subject of numerous essays (some of which are gathered in A Wild Salience: The Writings of Rae Armantrout. Currently, she teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Ben Doyle was born in Warsaw, New York, in 1973. He completed his undergraduate education at the State University of New York at Oswego and West Virginia University. His first collection of poetry, Radio, Radio, (Louisiana State University Press, 2001) was selected by Susan Howe for the 2000 Walt Whitman Award. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. He now co-edits the Kuhl House Series for the University of Iowa Press with Mark Levine.

Sandra Miller's first book of poems, Oriflamme, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2005 and features Olga Rozanova's heart w/ button and a set of staples on the cover. She has taught poetry, cinema, math, and dance. From Virginia, she has lived in Russia, Massachusetts, Slovenia, and Iowa, and practices calligraphy and hand-making books. She currently teaches at Cal State San Marcos.

Bridge Street Books is located 5 blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro, next to Four Seasons in Georgetown at the end of M street

open Monday - Saturday: 11:00am - 9pm
Sunday: 12pm - 6pm
(202) 965-5200

In business for over twenty years, Bridge Street is one of a rare breed these days--a successful independent bookseller. It has what is certainly the best poetry section in Washington, well-stocked in alternative poetry and poetics as well as mainstream. Bridge Street also has extremely good selections in Philosophy, Politics, Cultural Theory, Women's Studies, Film, Music, and other areas. They also have a plethora of quality sale books.

Manager (& well-known poet!) Rod Smith has been organizing readings in the Washington Area since 1988 and has brought Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, John Cage, Kevin Davies, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Tom Raworth, Lisa Robertson, Leslie Scalapino, Chris Stroffolino and many other important writers to DC.