Join us for a spoken word series at the Players Pub sponsored by the Writers Guild at Bloomington and featuring Joan Hawkins, Samantha Levy-Arnold, and Emily Bobo. Music will be by Shakespeare’s Monkey. The cost for this event is $5, and there will also be an open mic.
Emily Bobo turns poems into public goods (sandwiches! bus passes! books!) through a local, non-profit anthology series that she founded and continues to edit, entitled “Bobo Books: 1.1.1.” Author of a short book about a girl and her piano (FUGUE, Lost Horse Press, 2009), Bobo has also published original works in literary magazines, such as Hermeneutic Chaos, december, Seneca Review, and Redivider, and she particularly enjoys collaborating with composers who set her texts to music. Currently, Bobo is Professor of English and Department Chair of Fine Arts & Humanities at Ivy Tech Community College-Bloomington, where she teaches writing to single moms, ex-cons, military vets, and other non-traditional students.
Samantha Levy-Arnold earned her Ph.D. in English and creative writing from Florida State University. Her work has been published in various literary journals and anthologies including StoryQuarterly, Hayden Ferry’s Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, and she is an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College–Bloomington, where she also serves as an advisor to Phi Theta Kappa and co-coordinator to the Judy O’Bannon Youth Leadership Academy.
Joan Hawkins is a member of the Writers Guild at Bloomington and The Burroughs Century, Ltd. She writes creative memoir, nonfiction, and poetry; and she is committed to spoken word performance. She was one of the organizers of the recent Wounded Galaxies Festival: 1968—Beneath the Paving Stones the Beach symposium + festival, and is currently co-editing a book about writer William S. Burroughs (forthcoming from IU Press, 2019). In her day job, she teaches Film Studies at IU.
SHAKESPEARE’S MONKEY was formed in 1999 by William Sovern and Jean Kizer. Hailing from Evansville IN, the Monkeys are a performance group that fuses poetry & music, transforming personal experience into metaphor. They have performed in NYC poetry venues such as Dixon Place, CBGB’s, The Poetry Project at St. Marks, The Nuyorican, and Gathering of the Tribes, as well as GonzoFest Louisville 2018 and Insomniacathon Online Poetry Festival.