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Poet and Creative Writer Joe Wenderoth to read new work at REDCAT

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January 27, Los Angeles, CA--On Tuesday, February 1, 2005, at 8:30 pm, CalArts' School of Critical Studies will host Joe Wenderoth, the next writer in its reading series at REDCAT. The heralded author of the poetry collections Disfortune and It Is If I Speak and the genre-bending novel Letters to Wendy's, a collection of postmodern koans written on comment cards from the fast-food chain restaurant, will read from new works.

Wenderoth was born in a suburb of Baltimore in 1969. He attended local schools up through college until he began studying poetry as a graduate student in the MFA writing program at Warren Wilson College, the nation's first school to offer a low-residency graduate program in creative writing. There, he studied poetry and theory with the writer Heather McHugh, graduating in 1995 with a contract for his first book, Disfortune, which was published by the University of Wesleyan Press. The American Poetry Review described the collection as a book that "reduces sentience to slumber, reason to ritual, sight to shadow, and the human to the abject animal." Rain Taxi called the collection "one of the finest poetry debuts in years," and Bucknell University invited him on the basis of the book to serve as its first-ever Phillip Roth Writer-in-Residence.

Over the next five years Wenderoth wrote three more books, It Is If I Speak, The Endearment, and, in the spring of 2000, Letters to Wendy's, a collection of fictitious responses to the Wendy's fast food chain on its customer comment cards. After the book was excerpted in the summer of 2000 in Harper's magazine, Letters to Wendy's quickly became one of the best-selling books from an American small press, and subsequently won critical acclaim from sources as disparate as The Philadelphia Weekly, which called the book "a work of genius," from Rolling Stone magazine, which called it "one of the best books of 2000," and from The Boston Review, which described Letters to Wendy's as "a book that will likely become known in literary history as the most apt, able, and adventurous ars poetica to be produced for and by Generation X." In 2001, James Urbaniak, star of Hal Hartley's film Henry Fool, recorded a reading from the book on compact disk, and in 2002 it was adapted for a stage performance at the One Yellow Rabbit Theater Company in Calgary, Canada, by Bruce McCulloch, a founding member of Kids in the Hall.

Wenderoth has since become one of the most highly respected writers of his generation, described by Cal Bedient, poetry critic and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, as "a writer whose poetry makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible." In the fall of 2003, Wenderoth was named Professor of English at the University of California at Davis, a position he accepted after teaching for ten years at Southwest State University in Minnesota.

On Feburary 1st, following the reading, Wenderoth will converse on stage with Matthew Zapruder, a visiting poet in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts, and the founder and publisher of Verse Press, one of the most influential small presses to emerge in America in the past ten years. Mr. Zapruder's first collection, American Linden, was published in 2002 by Tupelo Press.

A book sale and signing will follow their conversation in the REDCAT lounge, sponsored by Dutton's Books.

This event is sponsored by the CalArts School of Critical Studies, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation, Poets and Writers, Inc., through a grant received from The James Irvine Foundation, and REDCAT's general programming sponsors: KCRW, The Standard Hotel, and the LA Weekly.

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for innovative visual, performing and media arts is located at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Ticket prices range $12-6, with student tickets available. Seating is general admission. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office--located at the corner of 2nd and Hope streets, by calling 213.237.2800 or at by clicking here.

Forthcoming readings in the 2004-2005 season:
March 1, Junot Diaz
April 5, Harryette Mullen

The MFA Writing Program at the School of Critical Studies attempts to question and provoke the mutations that may occur in forms and styles of writing and reading. It is neither a "creative" writing program nor a "critical" writing program, but is predicated on the assumption that critical writers need to think about questions of aesthetics, form, rhetoric, and mode of presentation while at the same time, developing an arsenal of critical ideas to structure and drive their work.

California Institute of the Arts, CalArts, the first U.S. higher educational institution to integrate the visual and performing arts under one roof, is recognized as the nation's leading laboratory for the arts. Housing six schools-Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater-CalArts embraces creative cross-pollination among diverse art forms and traditions, and strongly encourages each artist to pursue his or her vision within a broad context of social and cultural understanding.

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, REDCAT is an interdisciplinary arts center that introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the performing, visual and media arts from around the world, and gives artists and future artists in this region the production opportunities and creative support they need to achieve national and international stature.

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