Poets Julianne Neely and Rachelle Toarmino Reading Live with Virtual Guest Mary Ruefle
In-person poetry events return to Buffalo on Saturday, June 26, as the North Park Theatre hosts Foundlings Press and poets Julianne Neely, Rachelle Toarmino, and Mary Ruefle. The event—“Strays on Stage”—will feature live readings and conversation from Neely and Toarmino along with a recorded reading from virtual guest Ruefle.
Doors will open at 11 a.m. and the event will start promptly at 11:30 a.m. Guests will clear the building by 1:30 p.m. so that the North Park can begin its afternoon and evening programming. Copies of Strays Pack 4 and other Foundlings titles will be available—as will the North Park’s famous real-butter popcorn and other concessions.
“We’re thrilled to be bringing live poetry back to Buffalo with our friends at the North Park,” said Aidan Ryan, publisher of Foundlings Press. It’s incredible to reflect that just two months ago this would have been unthinkable. But now that it’s safe to gather in groups, we’re going big—big voices, the big stage, big buckets of buttery popcorn.”
“Mary, Julie, and Rachelle are some of today’s leading poets—a living legend, two celebrated innovators, and three dear friends of the press,” Foundlings editor in chief Max Crinnin added. “In addition to powerful new poems, I expect a scintillating conversation that will leave us all with much to think about for weeks to come.”
Strays on Stage celebrates the fourth release of Strays, a beloved series of limited-edition micro-publications from Foundlings Press. Each pack, hand-bound in Buffalo, features original work by three poets. Pack 4 features collections by Ruefle, Neely, and Toarmino. Pack 5, available for pre-order in December, will feature Derrick Austin, Jessica Fjeld, and Nicholas Rattner translating the Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román. Previous contributors have included Kazim Ali, Ralph Angel, Ramón García, Jakob Maier, Andrew Grace, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Robin Lee Jordan, Richard Jackson, and Ata Moharreri. Strays Packs 4 and 5 are supported in part through the New York State Council on the Arts and its DEC Grant program, administered locally by Arts Services Initiative (ASI).
About the poets
Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD student and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and more.
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
Rachelle Toarmino is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Sundress Publications, P-Queue, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag and currently serves as the assistant managing editor of jubilat. She lives between Buffalo and Western Massachusetts, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst.
About Foundlings Press
Foundlings Press is a literary publishing partnership based in Buffalo, New York. Foundlings earned a reputation as a pint-sized poetry powerhouse with the publication of the feted Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford (2018), a seminal anthology with over 30 contributors; and for Strays, an ongoing series of micro-publications that brings together work in packs featuring three poets twice annually. The press has also developed a robust catalog of full-length books of poetry and chapbooks. Foundlings holds a biennial chapbook contest that pairs the winning poet with a guest artist and book designer, and also facilitates the annual Ralph Angel Poetry Prize, honoring one poem with a limited edition broadside publication.
For more information or to place bulk orders, contact:
Aidan Ryan
Learn more at foundlingspress.com.