Jazz Hybrid Presents: An Evening of Poetry & Music.
Come listen to poets reading together, and musicians playing together, and poets and musicians jamming together.
It goes without saying that musicians collaborate with one another. It’s baked into the process. But one doesn’t often think of poets as collaborators. However, despite their solitary composition process, poets don’t work in total isolation. Often a variety of relationships support, inspire, and feed their creative process. Collaborators work on projects together. Mentors guide younger or less experienced writers, who in turn refresh the energy and vision of their teachers. Friends share their work with one another. But also: mothers and sons become each other’s editors, life partners intertwine their life and work, siblings participate in each other’s artistic process. Poetry is often in conversations with music, as well. Poets turn to music for inspiration, recite their work with musical accompaniment, or take music as their subject; likewise, musicians write lyrics, embrace spoken word collaboration, and turn to literary works for inspiration.
In honor of these complex and revitalizing truths, Jazz Hybrid Presents an Evening of Poetry & Music will serve as a showcase for regional and national poets and musicians, encouraging collaboration and hybrid forms and the relationships that sustain and nurture creative communities.
FEATURING…
-
RICHARD CHESS is the author of four books of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost (University of Tampa Press 2017, Tekiah (University of Georgia Press 1996; republished by University of Tampa Press 2000); Chair in the Desert (University of Tampa Press 2000); and Third Temple (University of Tampa Press 2006). His poems have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry.
He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Asheville, where for more than three decades he taught courses in English/Creative Writing and Jewish Studies. In the last decade of his career, he was a leader of UNC Asheville’s Contemplative Inquiry Initiative. He integrated a range of contemplative practices into his courses, including courses on Poetry as a Spiritual Practice and Spiritual Autobiographies. For ten years, he was active in the Center for Contemplative Mind’s Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. He directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years. He currently serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Heart for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
For many years, he has been interested in the role of arts in spiritual life and spiritual life in the arts. In 2016, he was a lead organizer of Faith in Lit: A Festival of Contemporary Writers of the Spirit. In 2021, he helped organize the Faith in Arts Institute, a project co- sponsored by UNC Asheville and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. The Faith in Arts Institute is an ongoing project. Information, including videos of performances, conversations, and other materials can be found on the BMCM+AC website.
-
Katherine Soniat’s chapbook The Goodbye Animals, winner of The Turtle Island Quarterly Chapbook Prize, is recently out from Foothills Press (2014). Her fifth collection of poems, The Swing Girl, (Louisiana State University Press) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and A Shared Life was awarded The Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press) and a Virginia Prize for Poetry. Other publications include A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, Dream Horse Press (2012); Alluvial (Bucknell University Press); Cracking Eggs (University Presses of Florida). Notes of Departure received the Camden Poetry Prize (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities). Other chapbook publications include Winter Toys (Green Tower Press) and The Fire Setters (WebDelSol’s Chapbook Series).
Bright Stranger was published in spring 2016, by Louisiana State University Press. She is the recipient of two Virginia Commission for the Arts Grants, a William Faulkner Award, a Jane Kenyon Award, Anne Stanford Award, and Fellowships to Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her work has been published in such journals as TriQuarterly, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, Georgia Review, and The Southern Review.
Originally from New Orleans, she has taught at the University of New Orleans, Hollins University, and for twenty years was on the faculty at Virginia Tech. The sense of place is central to her work, and she travels widely to immerse herself in various cultures so that they become transformative filters for more personal contexts. Crete, the Andes, the Bavarian Alps, and the Grand Canyon are a few of these regions she has included in her writing. Expanding the focus of poetry in such a way allows threads of art, myth, history, geography, and geology to inform her collections, shaping sequences of poems that resonate across a broad but personal spectrum.
-
Adam Lion is a percussionist dedicated to performing experimental music rooted in both classical and improvisational traditions. Based in Asheville NC, his performances have been described as “rife with psychological effects” by the New York Times and “closely attuned… playful, and mimetic” by Pitchfork Media. Notable projects include his 2020 release with Sarah Hennies and Ashlee Booth “The Reinvention of Romance” (Astral Spirits), a 2021 residency with New York University composer collective “nevermind the noise”, and his 2023 solo vibraphone album “Gilgul” (cmntx). He has collaborated closely with a diverse spectrum of contemporary artists including Harold Budd, Laura Steenberge, Matt Nelson, Mustafa Walker, Thom Nguyen, Brett Naucke, Mark Applebaum, Nief-Norf, bang on a can, and Sarah Hennies.
Lion has received grant funding from New Music USA, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The North Carolina Arts Commission. He has been a featured performer at many notable venues and festivals including the Big Ears Festival, {RE]Happening Festival, University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Duke University, the Red Room, MASS MoCA, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Lion holds an M.A. in Music from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a B.A. in Music from Southern Oregon University. He can be heard on the New Village Tapes, cmntx, Astral Spirits, and innova labels.