BANG OUT

“Lost on Friendship’s Path” by Marisa Crawford

(At the event Marisa Crawford also read selections from her new book The Haunted House, which is an excellent read and available from Switchback Books)

“I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Just Like These” by Sean Mclain Brown

“Another Kind of Heaven” by Sean Mclain Brown

“Boys Don’t Cry” by Sean Mclain Brown

“Between the cape and the petticoat” by Leora Fridman

“IOU” by Leora Fridman

“On the Challenger” by Leora Fridman

“As near as we come to another world” by Arisa White

“No Brakes” by Amanda B. Miller

“Letter to Mr. Jackson” by Lecia Smith

“Best Friends Forever: Footloose and Free” by Lecia Smith

The seventh installment of the BANG OUT Reading Series was held on May 15th at Amnesia in San Francisco. The event featured a special appearance by former BANG OUT reader Marisa Crawford, who read from her recently published book The Haunted House, which inspired our theme of childhood, friends and Trapper Keeper acronyms.

Marisa Crawford is the author of The Haunted House from Switchback Books. She grew up in New York and in Connecticut, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts, where she studied Creative Writing and Women’s Studies. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco where she works as a retail copywriter and sometimes tries to teach high school students about poetry & feminism. Some of her poems have appeared in Action, Yes, Shampoo, and Invisible Ear.

Sean Mclain Brown is a disabled former Marine and is a member of the Veteran’s Writing Workshop led by Maxine Hong Kingston. He teaches writing at De Anza College and Western Connecticut State University. His poetry and fiction has appeared more than 50 journals including, EM, First Intensity, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, LUNA, Sentence, Paragraph, and others. His work is also featured in two anthologies: 100 Best American Prose Poems anthology (Firewheel Editions), and Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (Koa Books).

Leora Fridman was born in Boston and lives in San Francisco. Her recent and forthcoming publications are included in Lumina, Sub-lit, The New Delta Review, We Are So Happy to Know Something, The Jerusalem Post, and others. Her chapbook “Telenovela Pregnancy Hoax” was a finalist for the 2009 Black River Chapbook Competition. She is an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst.

Michael McCarrin manages the website for Small Desk Press, and works days at Pottery Barn, where he converts the paragraphs that describe the products in their catalog into the bulleted lists that describe those products on their website. His writings are available for free online at www.potterybarn.com.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Factory Hollow Press published her chapbook Disposition for Shininess in 2008. In 2009 she was awarded the your word fellowship from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, received a Poets & Writers grant in 2008, and the 2007 Pavel Strut Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Western Michigan for a month-long residency in Prague. In 2006 she received the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a writing residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poem “Who Invited the Monkey to Omen’s Party” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. She is featured on the CD WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Minnesota Review, jubilat, Shampoo, Third Coast, The Drunken Boat, Gathering Ground: Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Reader, Meridians, Softblow, Snowvigate.com, Failbetter.com, A Gathering of Tribes, and African Voices. Additionally, her poems are featured in the anthology and staged production of a Fingernails Across A Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora.

Amanda B. Miller grew up in Delaware, Ohio and San Anselmo, California. As a child she wrote short stories about small-time
criminals and poems about the weather. Amanda studied creative writing as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz and later, received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona. She loves poetry and novels, but short stories are her thing.

Lecia Smith is a native San Franciscan, a writer and a private investigator. She finds all sorts of things but no, she isn’t “packing heat.” At least not right now. Lecia just finished her first novel and hopes it will be published before 2020.