Ayize @ Harvard

Mon 3 Mar 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ayize Jama-Everett, conferences| Posted by: Gavin

Ayize Jama-Everett will be at this Harvard conference on Wednesday and Thursday Psychedelics in Monotheistic Traditions: Sacramental Practice and Legal Recognition.

His film A Table of Our Own  is showing at Harvard Law School Room WCC 2004 on Wed. 3/5 @ 8pm & is free & open to the public.

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Ayize @ ALA, July 1

Wed 26 Jun 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ayize Jama-Everett, conferences, libraries| Posted by: Gavin

Ayize Jama-Everett (Heroes of an Unknown World) will be winging his way down to San Diego next Monday to take part in a panel at 2024 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition:

How the World Might Be: Speculative Fiction, Horror, and the Endless Possibilities of Genre Fiction

Speculative fiction, horror, and sci-fi offer endless possibilities for future worlds – so then why is so much of this genre associated with outdated tropes? In this diverse panel of authors and publishers, we’ll talk about how libraries can maintain a strong collection of genre fiction, and why speculative fiction can still give us hope in the bleakest times.

Panelists: Esme Addison, author of An Intrigue of Witches (Severn House); Bill Campbell, writer, editor, and owner of Rosarium Publishing; Ayize Jama-Everett, author of Heroes of an Unknown World (Small Beer Press); M. M. Olivas, author of Sundown in San Ojuela (Lanternfish Press); Jim Ruland, author of Make It Stop (Rare Bird); Sharon Virts, author of The Grays of Truth (Flashpoint); and moderated by Beth Reinker, manager of Collection Development Curation for Ingram Library Services.

Monday, July 1, 2024 

11:30 AM- 12:20 PM 

Stage: Diversity in Publishing Stage (Booth 2250)

There was a good and thoughtful review of Ayize’s most recent one by Jenny Hamilton on Strange Horizons:

The decision is shocking, and it highlights one of the key themes of the book: we are all imperfect, broken, compromised. The salvation of the world has fallen to Taggert and his team, and they are choosing to answer the call—but neither they nor the reader should be under any illusion that this makes them good guys. They’re not good now, and maybe they never can be. It’s just that they’re all they’ve got. Taggert and Tamara and Prentis are powerful, sure, but the most important thing they are is passionate.
What does it take to save the world — even if it’s not as you know it? Friends, frenemies, family, sacrifice, and a hell of a party.

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SBP at WisCon 2019

Mon 20 May 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Carol Emshwiller, conferences, conventions, Laurie J. Marks| Posted by: Gavin

Next weekend I’m happy to say I’ll be back at WisCon for the first time in a while. I’ll be running the Small Beer table in the dealers’ room on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — but I have to leave on Monday morning so do come before then!

I love the future WisCon imagines and present it inhabits, and Memorial Day weekend in Madison — with the farmers’ market and all those great restaurants — is a great place to be.

Twelve years ago we worked with Laurie J. Marks to make sure Water Logic would be available when she was Guest of Honor at WisCon 31 and the great news here is that Laurie is coming back to WisCon, and, if the shipping gods allow it, we will have all four new editions of her Elemental Logic series.

I am not 100% sure whether the rebound Water Logic will arrive on time. Fingers crossed. The rebinding means the trim size will be a tiny bit smaller than the other 3 volumes — just so that nothing is ever quite neat and square — but the choice was either recycling hundreds of books or rebinding.

The good news: we will definitely have Fire Logic, Earth Logic, and lo after these many long years: Air Logic.

We’ll also have the new issue of LCRW, a few books, some zines, and if all goes well the new issue of Reckoning.

On Friday afternoon if I’m not in the dealer’s room, you can find me at the Tiptree Bake Sale.

I don’t do many panels now, given that if I’m away from the table I want to hear other voices speak not mine, but there was one panel I did sign up for that I’m looking forward to. I hope to listen more than speak, am hoping to laugh but may cry:

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Juniper Fest & LCRW 37

Mon 2 Apr 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal., conferences| Posted by: Gavin

This Saturday, April 7, from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., we will be tabling at the Juniper Lit Fest Bookfair along with many other local and not-so-local publishers, magazines, a couple of food trucks, and bookstores (see below).

We will be dropping (and picking up and wondering who put butter on our fingers) the new issue of LCRW, the one with the dragon on the cover and besides some new books our half table of wonders will include some 3-for-2 or 2-for-1 or 50-for-10 deals of some description. Hope to see you there!

• Amherst Books
• Bateau Press
• Black Ocean
• Big Big Wednesday
• Calamari
• Cosmonauts Avenue
• Emily Dickinson Museum
• Factory Hollow Press
• Fence & Fence Books
• jubilat
• Juniper Summer Institute
• Levellers Press
• Massachusetts Review
• Meridians
• Mount Analogue
• Noo Journal/Magic Helicopter Press
• Ozy.com
• Perugia
• Post Road Magazine
• Radius
• Small Beer Press
• Siglio Press
• St. Petersburg Review
• Straw Dog Writers Guild
• The Common
• University of Massachusetts Press
• Wakefield Press

Here’s the fair’s own description:

The annual Juniper Literary Festival celebrates the literary community of the region and the UMass MFA Program present, past, and future and the intersections of those communities with the larger literary world. Join us for three days of events including readings by Sarah Lapido Manyika and Sally Wen Mao on Friday, April 6 at 8 pm.

Return on Saturday, April 7th for a small press and journal fair featuring local literary arts groups alongside local, regional, and national publications; discussions with literary agents and editors; an MFA alumni reading at 4:30 with Gabriel Bump, Stella Corso, Madeline ffitch, and Wendy Xu; community workshops with UMass MFA faculty; and a showcase of rare audio by Sterling Brown & Wallace Stevens. Experience Writers Off the Page and performance poetics. Explore a gallery of writing as visual art in the Visualizing Language exhibit. And join us for a reception where you can meet writers mentioned here and many others. Full schedule here.

There’s parking in the garage near South College ($1.75/hour) or on this map — there’s even an interactive parking map.

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Quick thoughts on WFC 2015

Mon 9 Nov 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Awards, conferences, Cons, history's wave crashing over us all, World Fantasy Awards| Posted by: Gavin

Holy bananas, that ended surprisingly well!

• This is why I never write these things. There’s too much I’ll miss and that’s an hour I should have been napping after the weekend working working!
• The book room was a huge, great well-lit space with tons of space for the crowds of eager readers ready to snap up hot hot books. Sadly said readers seemed to be seduced by Saratoga Springs’s lovely streets and great restaurants and mostly did not appear. Or they couldn’t get memberships or something. Darn it.
  • But: we now have signed copies of Howard Waldrop’s Howard Who?, Horse of a Different Color, and Nicole Kornher’ Stace’s Archivist Wasp in stock!
  • And there is secret Howard Waldrop news. We may have to reprint Howard Who? real soon now. Hmm!
• That said, Ninepin Press sold tons of copies of The Family Arcana from our table. People love Jed’s story-as-pack-of-cards.
• Lovely restaurants: Karavalli (Indian, wow); Hattie’s (all the sides = dinner for this happy vegetarian); Four Seasons (very handy for a box lunch for still happy parent and child); Cantina (Mexican: can you sit 10 people with no reservation for Sunday lunch? No problem — nice, thank you!).
• Out-of-con experiences: taking a 6-year-old to a con immediately changes everything. There are too many people, it’s chaotic, it’s an unfamiliar space — and, yes, that’s just me. But she made half a dozen books and met some friends so it was not all bad. And: hotel swimming pool, of course! Kid’s museum: high five for pre-arranged play dates! Another of course: the park. Hooray for finding the Triton’s pool and the statues of Pan, Dionysus, and the Maenads as well as leaves, man, leaves. You can do a lot with leaves and a bit of Greek mythology goes a long way.
• Meanwhile: Gary K. Wolfe reviewed Mary Rickert’s new book You Have Never Been Here in the Chicago Tribune. All right!

The Three Ps:

• Panels: they were epic! I suppose as I did not go to any, see out-of-con-experiences above, previously mentioned (and sometimes coldly abandoned) table in book room, and the theme was Epic Fantasy. There were some people I’d have loved to see on panels but I did not. C’est la vie.
• People: it is great to see friends and meet people only known online or . . . once-were complete strangers. I had one meeting at the con with Ron Eckel of Cooke International who does a fab job of selling our books abroad (dammit, that reminds me I have a list of things I have to send him) and otherwise “relied” on happenstance, which worked out mostly ok but for everyone I did not actually see. Oops.
• Parties: I got to two (er, I think), Kickstarter and Ellen Kushner et al’s Tremontaine, and they were both busy and well supplied, yay! The latter was such a happening that I ended up sitting on the floor outside chatting for a long, long while with many good people.

Also:

• The art show was great! We got a tiny skull with crown papercut by Kathleen Jennings and a fantastic painting we’ve admired for years by Derek Ford.
• I sneaked a galley of Sofia Samatar’s forthcoming novel The Winged Histories to one of the happiest people I know, Amal El-Mohtar. Yay!
• Chatted with Jeffrey Ford and Christopher Rowe. Why pick those two out of the hundreds? Because we like to transmute art into commerce and 2016 will see Jeff’s new collection A Natural History of Hell coming out and 2017 will see Christopher’s debut collection for which you should put in an extra pair of socks because it will knock them right off you and fortunately he is a much better writer than me so his book is actually good while my blog posts are, well, here we are, it never will end, will it?

Happily:

• The bust of H.P. Lovecraft is done and gone as the World Fantasy Award. Well done Gahan Wilson for making it in the first place and the board for making the decision. The world changes and we change with it and everyone I know is happy about this change.

Goofy story:

• On Sunday we went out to lunch with friends rather than taking the kid to the banquet. At 1:30 or so I got a phone call from Gordon Van Gelder (one of the award administrators) who asked if we’d be at the award ceremony later as he was wondering if our kids could have another play date while the adults droned on about awards. I thought this was a great idea so we made a play date.
  Which made sure we were back at the hotel.
  In time for the awards ceremony.
  In which we received an award.
  Ha!
  I swear I am not usually this dense (um, honestly . . .) but since the kids had had such a good time on Friday I figured this was legit. Ha again! I’ve even been party to wrangling unknowing award winners in the past. If anything I thought, hey, maybe Kelly’s story . . . ? but I really thought, ooh, playdate = happy kid. Hats off to Gordon, nicely done.

And the awards!

Congratulations to all the winners — and the nominees — especially Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory at ChiZine whose work ethic and determination to push great, dark books into the world is unequaled. It was fantastic to see the collection award shared between Angela Slatter and Helen Marshall. I hate awards because it is silly that not everything gets the prize. I was happy to remember Kathleen Addison’s The Goblin Emperor had won the Locus Award and I cannot wait until Kai Ashante Wilson starts racking them up. I wish Life Achievement award winner Sherri S. Tepper had been there because some of her books blew me away and I’d have liked to thank her.

It is an honor to have been nominated and a surprise to win. I did not have a speech — not hubris, I just thought the jury would go for something else as these awards tend towards the darker side of fantasy and as ever it was a very strong category. But afterwards I realized how silly I was: the book had a decent chance: it is called Monstrous Affections, the stories are bleak, amazing, dark, scary, fantastic. Of course I think it should win all the awards (hello Mr. Nobel Prize, do you do YA anthologies? Have you read Alice Sola Kim’s story that ends the book? Dare you to read it all alone late at night . . .) but still. And. Also. Anyway.

Thanks to the writers and artists in the book — this award is obviously really all about their stories. Thanks to Deborah Noyes our editor at Candlewick Press as well as Nathan Pyritz the designer and everyone at Candlewick who have made working on this book (and Steampunk!) such a joy. Thanks also to cover artist Yuko Shimizu and as always to Kelly’s fabulous and steadfast agent Renée Zuckerbrot. We’re grateful to the judges for their hard work and to the readers everywhere who have allowed us to keep living the dream.

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AWP Reading/Party: Thu April 9, 7 pm

Wed 1 Apr 2015 - Filed under: Not a Journal., A. DeNiro, Amalia Gladhart, conferences, Kelly Link, parties, readings| Posted by: Gavin

In less a week or so we will be in the Twin Cities (where our distro, Consortium is based, woohoo!) at the AWP Conference and Bookfair. To celebrate 1 million poets, writers, editors, publishers, readers, teachers, students, preachers, itinerant educators and professional argumentors getting together we are hosting a party with a few readings in it. Here are the salient details!

When: Thursday, April 9, 7 -9 pm
Where: Peterson Milla Hooks, 1315 Harmon Pl, Minneapolis, MN 55403 (4 minutes by car from l’hotel, says Google Maps)
What: Party — with short readings from . . .
Who:
Amalia Gladhart (translator of Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar)
A. DeNiro (Tyrannia)
Kelly Link (Get in Trouble)

We’ll also have a table in the Bookfair, #324, and will be there be most of the time (multiple snack breaks will be taken) while the Bookfair is open:

4/9     Thu. 9 am – 5 pm
4/10   Fri. 9 am – 5 pm
4/11    Sat. 9 am – 5 pm

and at said table on Friday morning we are very happy to announce that we will have those lovely writers in for signings!

Friday, April 10, 30-minute signings:
10 am  Kelly Link
10:30 am  Amalia Gladhart
11 am  A. DeNiro

This post will be updated with panel info and anything else that seems appropriate. Can’t wait to be standing there in the bookroom with 1000 (sounds about right, yes?) other indie presses. I am going to go and buy me some books, chapbooks, and journals. And maybe a T-shirt if I am lucky. Whomsoever brings the pink T-shirt, I am your buyer!

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