BANG OUT Volume XII: BLANK
“the _______ apartments” by Sarah Fran Wisby
“Call It What It Is” by Suzanne Kleid (via TheRumpus.net)
“History Lessons” by Brent Armendinger
“Rapping” by Jen Sullivan Brych
“Leonard B. Stern, Creator of Mad Libs, Dies at 88, June 7th, 2011″ by Aneesa Davenport
“This is a Story” by Brittany Billmeyer-Finn
“Encounter/Chronology” by Brittany Billmeyer-Finn
Watch the readers perform their pieces in our Video Library.
“BLANK” is… the perfect anti-theme, or the spaces we leave or that exist between us, between all things; what we choose to fill them with or how. Blank stares, shooting blanks, whatever the blankety blank. These seven readers performed their works at Amnesia on August 13th, 2011.
Sarah Fran Wisby writes poetry, fiction, memoir and essays, preferring always to deepen and subvert genre by way of the hybrid form. Her book Viva Loss was published in 2008 by Small Desk Press. Recent work can be found in Eleven Eleven Journal and Rumpus Women Volume 1, and heard on Invisible Cities Audio Tour #2: The Armada of Golden Dreams. She’s also been published in Instant City, Sparkle and Blink, Digital Artifact, and The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2, F—K, for which she was honored to write the entry for fuck. She performs her work all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and was a Literary Death Match champion in December 2010.
Suzanne Kleid is the manager of Readers Bookstore at the Main, a used bookstore inside the San Francisco Main Library. Her essays and fiction have appeared in the Believer, Bitch Magazine, Other Magazine, Watchword, Pindeldyboz, and We Still Like.
Brent Armendinger is the author of two chapbooks: Archipelago (Noemi Press) and Undetectable (New Michigan Press). His work has recently appeared in LIT, Court Green, VOLT, and Prism Review, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol. He teaches creative writing at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.
Diana Turken was born and raised in Los Angeles, Ca. She is currently working on her MFA degree in Poetry at Mills College. She likes to write about railroad barons, cowboys, and Californians. She is a cable news junkie, a basketball fanatic, and makes her own biscuits from scratch. She lives and works in Oakland.
Jen Sullivan Brych has written plays, fiction and journalism for places like the Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Rumpus, Killing My Lobster, the Bay Guardian and blah blah blah. She was a finalist for the Third Coast fiction prize and teaches creative writing and English at City College. She can be seen wrangling her huge baby at various city parks.
Aneesa Davenport lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Fanzine, Beeswax Magazine, Kitchen Sink, Monday Night, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She has read with Quiet Lightening, Funny/Sexy/Sad, and Don’t Mention It, a 24-hour literary reading. Find her at http://paragraphed.wordpress.com/.
Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, a Michigan Native and Oakland transplant moved here last August to attend Mills College. She is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at Mills, part time retailer, Maya Deren enthusiast, vintage dress collector and loves all things crystals, shells and feathers. Brittany lives in Downtown Oakland where her fellow poet housemates, graph paper notebooks and Magic, their cat, constantly inspire her. Also, Brittany is currently madly in love.