Re:Verse
The second Tuesday of every month, TheatresCool hosts Re:Verse, an evening for poetry and creative writing. The night begins with a featured special guest, usually a local published author, who shares past, current and works in progress with the audience. Many authors bring books to sign and sell and are open to answering any questions inspiring writers may have. The floor is then open to all who would like to share poetry and creative writing works of their own. The names are drawn from a hat by the last speaker and continued until everyone has an opportunity.
It’s a night not only about creative expression, but where artists can mingle, ask questions and share experiences. Our guests have included Kathleen Kirk, Duriel E. Harris, Holms Troelstrup, Ben Slotky, Jamison Lee, Susan Baller-Shepard, Judith Valente, Steve Halle, and Joanne Diaz.
February 2012
Steve Halle is a poet, teacher and football coach from Palatine, Illinois who received his MFA in Poetry from New England College. Steve runs a personal blog devoted to poetics and the arts, and he edits a blog-journal called Seven Corners which is a space for Chicago poets to publish innovative work and criticism.
November 2011
Kathleen Dusenbery will receive the Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University in December 2011, with a primary specialty in cognitive poetics and creative writing. Her writing explores the possibilities of human consciousness and extends the beliefs of the Surrealist Manifesto into her work, where she blends poetry with prose, music with words, and even math theory with metaphor. Her recent critical work can be found in in International Journal of Arts in Society; and poetry in Conclave: A Journal of Character, Sub-Lit, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Critiphoria, among others. She lives in Washington, IL with her husband and son.
October 2011
Jane L. Carman enjoys unruly writing that pushes against genre and expectations. She is an ABD PhD candidate at Illinois State University where she is a former Sutherland Fellow and is currently teaching literature and gender in the humanities. Her most recent work can be found in Devil’s Lake, Santa Clara Review, JAC, eilmae, Cormac McCarthy’s Dead Typewriter, Pequin, and forthcoming in The Dirty Fabulous (Jaded Ibis Press). She is the founder of Festival of Language, an annual array of artists in motion that coincides with AWP. Check out the Festival of Language at https://www.facebook.com/pages/AWP-2012-Festival-of-Language-a-reading/110261148999292
September 2011
Ricardo Cortez Cruz received his Bachelor of Science degree from Illinois State College where he was awarded the 1987-1988 Brome Creative writing award. After college Cruz went to write for the Herald Review in Decatur, he was a sportswriter, an intern, and a clerk for for six years, before he began writing for the Pantagraph, where he was also a sportswriter and a clerk. Following writing for the Pantagraph,Cruz began his career in 1992 as an English instructor at Heartland Community College and is currenty an English Professor at Illinois State University.
Literary works include, Straight Outta Compton, a novel about two friends growing up in Compton, California, and Five Days of Bleeding, a novel that takes place in Harlem, a homeless woman, named Zu-Zu Girl, sings to keep an up-beat attitude on life. The novel is set to blues and jazz music, while depicting the social chaos around the characters.
May 2011
Ben Slotky is the author of Red Hot Dogs, White Gravy. Probably the best book ever written in the history of the world, ever. Nobody writes about toothbrushes, dead mothers, divorce, bears, robots, tiny horses, fingernails, love, singing, Hitler, aliens, violence, loss, and rejection quite like Ben Slotky and nowhere does he do it better, funnier, hotter, and faster than in Red Hot Dogs, White Gravy, his insanely funny, pretty much all true first collection of stories. Part Raymond Carver, part rock song, part David Sedaris meets/makes out with Mark Leyner, part love story, part autobiography.
April 2011
Joanne Diaz received her BA from Tufts University; her MFA from New York University, where she was a New York Times fellow; and her PhD in English literature from Northwestern University, where she wrote a dissertation that focused on English Renaissance complaint poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, DIAGRAM, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, The Quercus Review, The Southern Review, and Third Coast. She is the recipient of an artist fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book, The Lessons, won the Gerald Cable first book award from Silverfish Review Press and was published in Spring 2011.
Joanne is also an active scholar. She has presented her research on complaint poetry at the Villanova Law, Literature, and Religion symposium and at annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the Sixteenth Century Society. She regularly gives pre-show lectures at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. She has taught literature and creative writing to high school students at the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities in New York City; to college students at New York University, Boston College, and Northwestern University; and to adult learners at the Newberry Library. She is an assistant professor in the English department at Illinois Wesleyan University.
March 2011
Holms Troelstrup finished her Master’s in English with a concentration in Creative Writing in August at Illinois State University where she was the Sutherland Fellow in Poetry. She had the opportunity to teach 2 creative writing courses and loved teaching more than she thought possible. She also worked as a production assistant for the Spoon River Poetry Review and currently works with the publication as an editorial assistant. Holms’ writing can be found online at SevenCorners and Moria and is forthcoming in print in The Dirty Fabulous, through Jaded Ibis press. One of her first short fiction attempts won The Guild Complex Very Short Fiction Competition in December of 2009.
February 2011
Steve Halle is a poet, teacher and football coach from Palatine, Illinois who received his MFA in Poetry from New England College. Steve runs a personal blog devoted to poetics and the arts, and he edits a blog-journal called Seven Corners which is a space for Chicago poets to publish innovative work and criticism.