Great to hear that two of my favourite American poets – Joan Jobe Smith and Fred Voss - will be appearing at the Humber Mouth Literary Festival in Hull on July 5th.
I’ll most certainly be making the trip to Hull Truck Studio for this event. Not very often I’m tempted to come out of hiding, but this will be well worth the journey (I’ll also have details of an exclusive event in London with Fred, Joan, and a host of red-hot names from the underground to be announced shortly…)
‘As part of The Humber Mouth Literature Festival, Hard Rhymes and Great Exclamations presents The Long Beach Connection with Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith.
Travelling over from the United States especially for this event, Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith will be appearing in the studio space at Hull Truck Theatre, with an evening of vivid vignettes that pull no punches and will hit you in the gut.
Fred Voss has been a machinist for 30 years, picking up the pen and the wrench to chronicle what goes on between tin walls. He has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe, Goodstone (1991), Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls (1998) and Hammers and Hearts of the Gods (2009).
His work has been featured prominently by the magazines Bete Noire in Britain and Wormwood Review in the States, and he won the 1988 Wormwood Award. Love Birds, a collaboration with his poet wife Joan Jobe Smith, won the 1996 Chiron Prize. He lives in Long Beach, California, and works in a nearby factory.
Joan Jobe Smith was born January 25th 1940 in Paris, Texas and moved to Long Beach, California 6 weeks later. A 1975 graduate of California State University Long Beach, she subsequently received her Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from the University of California Irvine.
The founding editor of Bukowski Review and Pearl (celebrating its 46th issue), her work, since 1974, has appeared internationally in more than 1,000 journals and anthologies and she has published more than 18 collections of poetry’
Visit this link for further details.
