Just Buffalo Literary Center

Last updated

Just Buffalo Literary Center (JBLC) is a not-for-profit literary organization centered in Buffalo, NY which serves the greater Western New York region as a literary curator.

Contents

Just Buffalo Literary Center's business office is currently located above the Western New York Book Arts Center on Washington Street.

History

Inception

Just Buffalo began in 1975 when founder Debora Ott hosted a reading featuring Diane di Prima at the Allentown Community Center. In the following years, notable authors and poets such as Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, and Ted Berrigan came to Buffalo to participate in readings offered by what had by then become "Just Buffalo". The organization proceeded to host writing workshops for writers of all-ages and published a literary magazine. It also had a radio show.

Continued growth

In 1982, Just Buffalo Literary Center established its renowned Writers in Education program, providing in-school creative writing programs for young people. At their peak, this program served approximately 4,000 students per year. After more than two decades of stewarding community-based literary programs and establishing Just Buffalo Literary Center as a national presence on the literary scene, Debora left the organization in 1998. She hired Michael Kelleher as artistic director in the months before she left. Ed Taylor served as executive director from 1998-2001.[ citation needed ]

2002-present

Laurie Dean Torrell took over as executive director in 2002, ushering in a new era. During her tenure, Just Buffalo Literary Center moved from the Tri-Main Center to the Market Arcade Building in 2005, a change which marked the beginning of an administrative collaboration with CEPA and Big Orbit Galleries. In 2016, Just Buffalo Literary Center moved from the Market Arcade Building to its current home on the second floor at the corner of Washington and Mohawk in downtown Buffalo.

Just Buffalo Literary Center's program office staff currently consists of Laurie Dean Torrell, executive director; Barbara Cole, artistic director; Noah Falck, education director; Kristen Pope, development director.

Programs

BABEL

BABEL is an international literary lecture series that brings notable authors to Buffalo to speak four times per year. It is cosponsored by Hallwalls. It was conceived of in 2006 by Michael Kelleher, who was at the time Just Buffalo's artistic director. [1] The series was launched in 2007. Past authors have included Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul, as well as global literary icons Isabel Allende, Amos Oz, Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, Chinua Achebe and many others.

BABEL was initially hosted in folk-musician Ani Difranco's recording space, "Babeville", in the old Asbury Delaware United Methodist Church, until it outgrew the space late in its second season and moved to Kleinhans Music Hall.

In 2009, BABEL was awarded "Most Innovative Arts Programming (any artform)" by Buffalo Spree Magazine. [2]

The BABEL series has been hailed by the Buffalo News as:

...one of the most exciting literary series Buffalo has ever seen. [3]

In describing BABEL in its first year, Kelleher states:

The idea of the series is really to bring global perspective to the literary discussion in Buffalo. [4]

Big Night

Big Night is a multi-disciplinary poetry series featuring poets from around the country alongside local artists in other media such as music, film, video, and visual art. It is hosted at the Western New York Book Arts Center in downtown Buffalo.

Writing With Light

Writing with Light is the name for Just Buffalo's joint educational programs. In partnership with CEPA Gallery, Writing With Light offers multidisciplinary school programs such as “Picturing Poetry,” which takes a school-based, multidisciplinary approach in order to combine creative writing with photography and other art forms.

Spotlight On Youth

Spotlight on Youth is an open mic series open to artists aged 12–21 that meet at the Smith Theatre in Shea's Performing Arts Center six times per year.

Related Research Articles

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is a contemporary performance and visual arts organization in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. PICA was founded in 1995 by Kristy Edmunds. Since 2003, it has presented the annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) every September in Portland, featuring contemporary and experimental visual art, dance, theatre, film/video, music, and educational and public programs from local, national, and international artists. As of November 2017, it is led by Executive Director Victoria Frey and Artistic Directors Roya Amirsoleymani, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy.

The National Arts Centre (NAC) is a performing arts organisation in Ottawa, Ontario, along the Rideau Canal. It is based in the eponymous National Arts Centre building.

The Columbia University School of the Arts, is the fine arts graduate school of Columbia University in Morningside Heights, New York. It offers Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees in Film, Visual Arts, Theatre and Writing, as well as the Master of Arts (MA) degree in Film Studies. It also works closely with the Arts Initiative at Columbia University (CUArts) and organizes the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), a week-long program of screenings, screenplay, and teleplay readings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hallwalls</span>

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit art organization located in Buffalo, New York. Since 1974, Hallwalls has shown and shows the work of contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds who work in film, video, literature, music, performance, media and the visual arts. The ideology behind Hallwalls has always been one of a cooperative with artists and the gallery has made it a mission to show work that directly shows Buffalo’s fading industrial past.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Hancock Rux</span> American performer, writer and artist

Carl Hancock Rux is an American poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, recording artist, journalist, curator and social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Theater at CalArts University. Described in the NY Times as "a breathlessly inventive multimedia artist" focused on "art, race, memory and power",[1] Rux is the author of several books including the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta, the novel, Asphalt, and the OBIE Award-winning play,Talk and five albums. He appears as a frequent collaborating artist, most notably on Gerald Clayton's album Life Forum[2] and as co-author of the staged incarnation of Steel Hammer by Julia Wolfe, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize-nominated work, created with Anne Bogart.[4] Rux is the author/performer of the Lincoln Center commissioned experimental short poetic film The Baptism, a tribute to civil rights activists John Lewis and C. T. Vivian, directed by Carrie Mae Weems.

angela rawlings is a Canadian poet, editor, and interdisciplinary artist who uses many spectacular languages for her material.

Michael Kelleher is an American poet. He is the author of four collections of poems, Visible Instruments, Museum HoursHuman Scale and To Be Sung. His poems and essays have appeared at The Brooklyn Rail, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Colorado Review, ecopoetics, and many others. He has read his work throughout the U.S., in Canada, the U.K., and Africa, and also as part of the Encuentro del Poesia Del Lenguaje in Havana, Cuba, in 2001. With Ammiel Alcalay, he founded OlsonNow, a project devoted to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. From 2008-2013, he produced a blog project called "Aimless Reading", in which he daily photographed, catalogued, and wrote about the more than 1200 titles in his personal library. He is the former Artistic Director of Just Buffalo Literary Center, where in 2007 he founded Babel, an international author lecture series, at which he conducted live, on-stage interviews with authors such as Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. In 2012, he was appointed the founding Director of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature is an annual week-long literary festival held in New York City and Los Angeles. The festival was founded by Salman Rushdie, Esther Allen, and Michael Roberts and was launched in 2005. The festival includes events, readings, conversations, and debates that showcase international literature and new writers. The festival is produced by PEN America, a nonprofit organization that works to advance literature, promote free expression, and foster international literary fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kelly Writers House</span>

The Kelly Writers House is a mixed-use programming and community space on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Debora Greger is an American poet as well as a visual artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Texas State University MFA</span>

The Texas State University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is a three-year graduate program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, USA. Fiction writer Doug Dorst is the current director of the program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank X Walker</span> African-American poet from Kentucky, born 1961.

Frank X Walker is an African-American poet from Danville, Kentucky. Walker coined the word "Affrilachia", signifying the importance of the African-American presence in Appalachia: the "new word ... spoke to the union of Appalachian identity and the region's African-American culture and history". He is a Professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky and was the Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2013-2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Seibles</span> American poet

Tim Seibles is an American poet, professor and the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Fast Animal. His honors include an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In 2012 he was nominated for a National Book Award, for Fast Animal.

GrubStreet, Inc. is a non-profit creative writing center located in Boston, Massachusetts that hosts workshops, seminars, consultations, and similar events. It also offer scholarships.

Glass Mountain is an undergraduate literary magazine at the University of Houston that was established in 2006. The title is an allusion to a short story with the same title by Donald Barthelme. The magazine publishes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, literary essays, and art written by undergraduates. Each issue also includes interviews with notable literary figures, including Mat Johnson, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, Tony Hoagland, and others. The publication is listed in the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and launched its first national issue in 2011. In 2013, the journal was awarded the Director's Prize for content by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

Letras Latinas is the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), with an office on campus in South Bend, Indiana, as well as Washington, D.C. It strives to enhance the visibility, appreciation and study of Latino literature both on and off the campus of the University of Notre Dame, with an emphasis on programs that support newer voices, foster a sense of community among writers, and place Latino writers in community spaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erica Hunt</span> American poet, essayist

Erica Hunt is a U.S. poet, essayist, teacher, mother, and organizer from New York City. She is often associated with the group of Language poets from her days living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but her work is also considered central to the avant garde black aesthetic developing after the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hunt worked with several non-profits that encourage black philanthropy for black communities and causes. From 1999 to 2010, she was executive director of the 21st Century Foundation located in Harlem. Currently, she is writing and teaching at Wesleyan University.

Woodland Pattern Book Center is a nonprofit organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Riverwest neighborhood that is dedicated to the discovery, cultivation, and presentation of poetry and the arts. The organization was founded in 1979 by Karl Gartung, Anne Kingsbury, and Karl Young, and was named after a passage in poet Paul Metcalf's Apalache: "South of Lake Superior, a culture center, the Woodland Pattern, with pottery but without agriculture..."

Robert J. Hirsch is an American artist, curator, educator, historian, and author. He is best known for his writing about color and digital imaging and about the history of photography, and as an advocate for photographers who offer a haptic, expressionist interpretation of their subject matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bronx Council on the Arts</span> Art based culture agency

The Bronx Council on the Arts, is an art based culture agency that has grown to become the official cultural agency of the Bronx, New York City. It provides a “lifeline” to more than 4,800 artists and over 250 arts and community-based organizations.

References

  1. Colin Dabkowski (2012-04-15). "The man who built Babel - Books & Poetry". The Buffalo News. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  2. "Buffalo Spree Magazine". Buffalospree.com. 1979-06-26. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  3. Jeff Simon (2011-04-14). "Babel books top global writers for 2011-12 season - Entertainment". The Buffalo News. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  4. Koch, Peter. "Babel". Artvoice.com. Archived from the original on 2012-11-07. Retrieved 2012-06-22.