16 March 2007 12am - 12am

Test Reading Series

Friday March 16, 7:30 pm: Stuart Ross and Rod Smith

Stuart Ross is a Toronto fiction writer, poet, editor, small-press publisher, and creative-writing instructor who has been active in the Toronto literary scene since the mid-1970s. He sold 7,000 copies of his self-published poetry and fiction chapbooks in the streets of Toronto during the ’80s and is a co-founder, with Nicholas Power, of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, an underground literary institution since 1987. He is the author of five major collections of poetry, most recently Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW, 2003) and the forthcoming I Cut My Finger (Anvil, 2007), as well as numerous works of fiction, a collection of personal essays, and countless chapbooks and items of ephemera. He has supported scores of other writers through his various small press ventures and editorial work.

Rod Smith is the author of Music or Honesty, The Good House, Poèmes de l’araignée (France), In Memory of My Theories, The Boy Poems, Protective Immediacy, and New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma. His latest collection, Deed, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2007. A CD, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. Smith’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Anthology of New (American) Poets, The Baffler, The Gertrude Stein Awards, Java, New
American Writing, Open City, Poésie, Poetics Journal, Shenandoah, and The Washington Review. He edits Aerial magazine, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. The next issue of
Aerial will focus on poet Lyn Hejinian. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press.

The Test Reading series is curated by Mark Truscott. For more information, including audio recordings of previous readings, please visit www.testreading.org.