Lannan Readings & Conversations
August Kleinzahler
with Kate MosesWednesday March 3 2010
Streaming Audio and Podcast Now Available
Click the Play button (triangle) to listen to the August Kleinzahler introduction and Reading.
Click the Play button (triangle) to listen to the August Kleinzahler Conversation with Kate Moses.
August Kleinzahler's poetry is described by the New York Times as "a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat. His personality combines Allen Ginsberg's goofball charm and Norman Mailer's inveterate pugnacity." He has published eight books of poetry, including A Calendar of Airs (1978); Earthquake Weather (1989); Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow (1995); and in 2003, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep which won the 2004 Griffin International Poetry Prize and the 2004 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California, and was short-listed for the U.K.'s Forward Prize in Poetry. His most recent collection of poetry is Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. He is also the author of a book of prose, Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (FSG, 2004).
His poems have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, and The Paris Review. A native of Jersey City, Kleinzahler is the recipient of many awards, including a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 2008. Kleinzahler has been a taxi driver, a locksmith, a logger, and a building manager. He has taught creative writing courses at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, as well as to homeless veterans in the Bay Area. He lives in San Francisco. On the title of poet, Kleinzahler says, "I don't like to call myself a poet. Most poets are shiftless, no-account fools."
Kate Moses is the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, published in thirteen languages. Her memoir, Cakewalk, is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2010. As a senior editor and staff writer for Salon, Kate co-founded Salon's award-winning daily feature "Mothers Who Think" and co-edited, with Camille Peri, two popular anthologies of essays on motherhood, Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves and the national bestselling, American Book Award-winning Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood. Kate is a native of San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, journalist and Salon founding editor Gary Kamiya, and their two children.
