Please join us to celebrate ten years of publishing poetry from A Midsummer Night’s Press.

Since the press’ beginnings in 2007, it has championed LGBT voices with its Body Language imprint, later adding the Sapphic Classics series (co-published with Sinister Wisdom) which reprints iconic lesbian feminist texts with new introductions and afterwords, making them available to a new generation of readers.

Authors published in Body Language include: Achy Obejas, Brane Mozetic, Julie R. Enszer, Raymond Luczak, Roz Kaveney, David Bergman, Lawrence Schimel, Michael Broder, Julie Marie Wade, and Rigoberto González.

Authors published in Sapphic Classics include: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Cheryl Clarke, elana dykewomon, and Pat Parker.

The press also publishes poetry in translation by women writers under the Periscope imprint, featuring poets from Estonia, Slovenia, Spain and Lithuania so far, and mythic poetry under the Fabula Rasa imprint, which has published authors like Rachel Pollack, Francesca Lia Block, and Jane Yolen, among others.

All of A Midsummer Night’s Press’ titles will be available at the Bureau.

Reception at 7pm, Readings at 7:30pm.

Readers:

David Bergman

Michael Broder

Cheryl Clarke

Rachel Pollack

Lawrence Schimel

Julie Marie Wade

David Bergman is the author of four books of poetry: Fortunate Light (A Midsummer Night’s Press), Heroic Measures, The Care and Treatment of Pain, and Cracking the Code. He is poetry editor of The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. He is winner of the Lambda Literary Prize as the editor of Men on Men 2000.  He has published two studies, The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture and Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature.  Educated at Kenyon College and The Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a Ph.D., he is a professor of English at Towson University.  He lives in Baltimore with his partner of many years, John Lessner.

Michael Broder is the author of the poetry collections This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry) and Drug & Disease Free (Indolent Books). He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the founding publisher of Indolent Books and the creator of the HIV Here & Now Project. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

Cheryl Clarke is a poet, essayist, scholar and activist. She is the author of the poetry collections: By My Precise Haircut, Experimental Love, Humid Pitch, Living as a Lesbian (reprinted by Sapphic Classics), and Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women. She is also the author of the study After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement as well as the volume of her selected works The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980-2005. She lives with her partner in Jersey City, NJ and Hobart, NY.

Rachel Pollack is an author (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction) and an authority on the modern interpretation of Tarot cards. Her novel Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award and her novel Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Some of her non-fiction works include 78 Degrees of Wisdom and The Body of the Goddess. She is also the creator of The Shining Tribe Tarot, which she wrote and illustrated herself, and teaches in the MFA program at Goddard College. A Midsummer Night’s Press published her first collection of poetry, Fortune’s Lover: A Book of Tarot Poems.

Lawrence Schimel writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books as author or anthologist, in many different genres. He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice, for PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen) and First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté), in addition to numerous other awards. He is the publisher of A Midsummer Night’s Press, which has also published his collections Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names. He is also a prolific literary translator.

Julie Marie Wade is the award-winning author of the poetry collections When I Was Straight (A Midsummer Night’s Press), SIX, Postage Due and Without, as well as the prose works Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir), Small Fires: Essays, Tremolo: An Essay, and Catechism: A Love Story, in addition to a forthcoming collection co-written with Denise Duhamel. She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and lives in the Sunshine State with her wife Angie Griffin.