Jen Bervin and David Abel

Zinc Bar’s Sunday Reading Series invites you to a reading by Jen Bervin and David Abel.

Reader Bios:

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin’s large-scale sewn composites of Dickinson’s fascicle marks and other works have been exhibited in the
US and France. Her recent books include The Desert (Granary Books 2008), A Non-Breaking Space (UDP 2005), and Nets (UDP
2004). In The Desert, Jen Bervin continues in the tradition of poetic composition by erasure—by sewing. Taking John Van Dyke’s prose
celebration of American wilderness The Desert (1901) as a point of departure, Bervin has sewn, row by row, across 130 pages of Van Dyke’s
prose, creating a poem that forms its own elemental landscape and shares Van Dyke’s poetic attention to visual phenomena. More work has
been featured recently in “Esopus” and “Double Change.” Jen Bervin is a 2007 Poetry Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the
Arts and has received fellowships in art and writing from The MacDowell Colony, Centrum Arts, and The Camargo Foundation in Cassis,
France. She is a contributing editor for “jubilat” and lives in New York. (Thanks to the Granary Books website for the above).

David Abel moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1997, after tenures in New York City and Albuquerque (where he maintained the Bridge Bookshop,
and Passages Bookshop & Gallery, respectively). He is a founding organizer of Portland’s Spare Room reading series (www.flim.com/spareroom), now in its ninth year. The author of various chapbooks and artist’s books, most recently Commonly (airfoil), While You Were In (disposable books), and Twenty- (Crane’s Bill), he frequently collaborates on multimedia and peformance projects, and is the is the publisher of the Envelope broadside series, and copublisher with Sam Lohmann of airfoil chapbooks.