Tonight it's a punk lit roadshow with touring authors Adam Gnade (Kansas), Andrew Mears (England), and Joshua Jones (Wales), as well as Boulder-semi-local Rin Hart (Bay Area) for an evening of radical literature book readings. They will also have the mobile bookfair Ruby Teeth Homestead Literary Farmstand, with books, zines, vinyl, and books on tape from indie artists all around the world.
Joshua Jones is a queer, neurodivergent writer & artist from South Wales. He co-founded Dyddiau Du in Cardiff, a library and artspace led by and for LGBTQ+ and Disabled communities. Local Fires (Parthian Books, 2023) is his first book, and was recently shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was also the creative editor for the Room/Ystafell/Phòng (Parthian Books, 2023) anthology, celebrating queer voices from Wales and Viet Nam. His visual art considers the physicality of text and poetics through installation - often incorporating collage, found objects, sound and text.
His next project is a pamphlet of poetry, released in the US by Hello America Stereo Cassette, summer 2024. Titled 'Three Months in the Zebra Room', this sequence of poems laid out as diaristic extracts consider poor mental health at the tail end of COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK, the tension between lodgers and landlords when occupying a small space, the poet's father's cancer diagnosis, and bloodthirsty cats, and finding beauty in the small, everyday moments.
Links:
X : @nothumanhead
Instagram: @joshuajoneswrites
Local Fires - www.parthianbooks.com/products/local-fires
Andrew Hykel Mears is based in Bristol, England. His poetry has been published by PN Review, Propel Magazine, The Oxonian Review, Pariah Press, Anthropocene Poetry, and elsewhere. He has exhibited large-scale text-as-installation at Modern Art Oxford and Electrowerkz, London. Andrew is the Editor-in-chief of Ambient Receiver, a literary journal publishing creative writing, audio-cartography and sound pieces that embrace profound relationships with the ‘natural’ world, offering new perspectives to ecological and civilisational crises.
Working toward his doctorate—researching poetry's potential as a climate action tool—he is developing principles of ‘Ambient Eco-Poetics’ to articulate the reciprocal, more-than-human world to which we belong. His research interests include uncertainty as a field of meaning, time cultures, anarchism, posthumanism, the politics of listening, and sensuous experience as a way of knowing.
As a musician, he's composed for contemporary dance and spoken word, performed live improvised film soundtracks at the ICA, and backed poet & rapper, Saul Williams, author & musician Adam Gnade, and Can’s Damo Suzuki. He was a founding member of the bands Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies and Foals.
Links:
Andrewhykelmears.uk/
Insta: @Andrewhykelmears
Adam Gnade's work comes from the heart of summer and "the heart of Saturday night." It's a dirty, knocked-down America of truckstops and mall parking lots, water towers and grain silos, late-night conversation on porches, dark woods and fields, wild times in neon-lit cowboy bars or sun-lit apartment blocks where you feel like the last human on Earth. Spread across We Live Nowhere and Know No One, a connected series of novels and audio recordings of writing backed by noisy folk music (self-described as "talking songs"), his cast of reoccurring characters inhabits a world of loneliness on river docks at sundown, cattle towns and beach houses, vodka in the evening heat, sailor bars and bayside piers, bats in the dusk, the sound of distant freight trains, the clatter of BQE, failing industry, red brick tenements, ghost towns of factories, the Atlantic Seaboard or the Pacific Ocean as the end of the world, foggy San Francisco streets, morning skies over Brooklyn looking for the ghost of Lou Reed, punk songs on long Southern drives, country music radio in Texas desert, crumbling farmhouses in the weeds, good and ill, sweet and vile, all the truth.
Links:
adamgnade.com/
Instagram: @adamgnade
Substack: https://adamgnade.substack.com/
Rin Hart
The subject of Rin’s writing is lived experience: from (mis)adventures in fringe living, to using landscape and anniversaries to revisit and process traumas, to what happens when identity clashes with social custom and personal desire. In addition to writing memoir and poetry, Rin works to empower victims of rape who are underrepresented by the Me Too movement and underserved by systems which operate on a gendered and sexualized misunderstanding of rape.
Rin’s prose has appeared in Cipher Magazine, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Beyond The Veil Press, and Boulder Poetry Scene. Their first audio-literary album was released by Hello America Stereo Cassette. They’ve been featured on The Poet’s Podcast and in Climbing Magazine.
Born and raised in Berkeley, CA, Rin is closest to home when on the road or in the ocean.
IG is @rin.hart.writer
