KGB Bar

“Poetry taken to the edge and back round again.”
Uphook Press celebrates the publication of its latest anthology hell strung and crooked. Based in New York City, Uphook Press specializes in work by poets and spoken word artists who love both the ink and the mike.

VICKI IORIO performs throughout Long Island and New York City and is a proud member of the Farmingdale Writers Group.

R. NEMO HILL is the author of Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002), The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004), and Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006).  He is editor of EXOT BOOKS.

DAVID LAWTON is a performer, poet, and writer originally from Woburn, MA. During his 25 years in New York City, David has acted, written plays, and sung backing vocals for the underground band, Leisure Class.

E. K. MORTENSON was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and is the author of Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010). He lives in Stamford, CT.

PUMA PERL facilitates workshops in community-based agencies and at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She is the author of Belinda and Her Friends (Erbacce Press, 2009) and knuckle tattoos, (Erbace Press, 2010).

JOHN MARCUS POWELL has strutted the boards in London’s West End, Off and Off-Off Broadway, and appeared on television and film. Recently he’s been concentrating on writing poetry—a lot of it about being queer in a queer world.

JACKIE SHEELER’s third book, earthquake came to harlem, is published by NY Quarterly this fall.  She is a poet, songwriter, and activist who enjoys performing random acts of kindness almost as much as random acts of righteous indignation.

ELLIOTT D. SMITH spent the first 18 years of his life in the same house in Louisville, KY, but has since resided in ten places in Oxford, Cincinnati, and Yellow Springs, OH, as well as four in Brooklyn, NY. With a degree in psychology, Elliott conducts research on masculinity, friendships, and identity formation.

OCEAN VUONG was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in New York City, where he is an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College. His poems appear in Word Riot, Connecticut River Review, Asian American Poetry, and SOFTBLOW, among others.

BRUCE WEBER is the author of five books of poetry, including The Break-up of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press, 2009) and has been widely published in magazines and anthologies including Up is Up, But So Is Down: Downtown Writings, 1978-1992 (NYU Press, 2006).