Denise Duhamel and Katie Degentesh come to Frequency North

"Frequency North," the aggressively eclectic visiting writers series at The College of Saint Rose, wraps up its second year with readings by Denise Duhamel and Katie Degentesh.

Duhamel and Degentesh will appear at Saint Rose Thursday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. in the Saint Joseph Hall Auditorium, 985 Madison Ave., Albany.

Copies of their works will be available for purchase and signing.

The April 26 program is sponsored by the Saint Rose School of Arts and Humanities and is free and open to the public.

Duhamel is no stranger to the Capital Region literary scene, having spent residencies at Yaddo in 1990, 1994, 1995 and 2002. She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, her most recent titles being Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), Queen for a Day (2001) and Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005). Just out is Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007), which she co-edited with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad. Other books by Duhamel currently in print are Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999), Kinky (1997), Girl Soldier (1996), and How the Sky Fell (1996). In 1999, she was a featured poet on Bill Moyers' PBS special "Fooling with Words." A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she has been published in numerous anthologies, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry (1993, 1994, 1998 and 2000). Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Fla.

Degentesh is the author of The Anger Scale (Combo Books, 2006), a series of poems titled with questions from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and constructed with the help of Internet search engines such as Google. Publisher's Weekly recently wrote of her: "Degentesh inhabits the poems' weirdly pathologizing psychic space with a deep love of overheard speech that's charged with unconscious (and sometimes not so unconscious) violence, longing and misunderstanding…" She is a member of the Flarflist Collective, an avant garde poetry movement whose members mine the Internet with odd search terms and construct poems, plays and other texts from the search results. Her writing has appeared in Shiny, Fence and The Poetry Project Newsletter, among other places. Degentesh lives in New York City.

"Frequency North" is the brainchild of Daniel Nester, an assistant professor of English at Saint Rose. In creating the series in 2006, Nester set about to plug what he perceived as a large gap in the literary events offered in the Capital Region. He purposely designed the series to be "aggressively eclectic." Visiting writers have included champion slam poets, experimental essayists, writers who use Google and junk e-mails to create poems, and a poetry reading cleverly disguised as a TV talk show. In addition to teaching, Nester is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, collections about his obsession with the rock band Queen. Nester's creative work has appeared in jubilat, Crazyhorse, Open City, Spoon River Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2003, among other places. He also writes for Poets & Writers, Time Out New York and Bookslut. Nester is assistant web editor for sestinas for McSweeney's and publishes and edits the online journal "Unpleasant Event Schedule."

"Frequency North" is funded in part by Poets & Writers Inc. with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. The series will return for its third year in fall 2007.

For more information about the "Frequency North" writers series, contact Daniel Nester in the Saint Rose English department at (518) 454-2812 or e-mail nesterd@strose.edu.

Link to Denise Duhamel and Katie Degentesh come to Frequency North