Penn Book Center
130 S. 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 9104
United States
Free and open to the public.
Join the Penn Book Center for an evening of readings celebrating the release of David Nutt’s novel The Great American Suction, featuring readings by Grady Chambers (North American Stadiums, 2018), Christopher Kennedy, & David Nutt!
About The Great American Suction:
Drug-addled yard workers. Black-marketeering militiamen. Aimless celebrity impersonators. Narcotized puffer fish. And at the center of it all, a pair of glue-huffing cousins who attempt to cope with the relentless disasters of their lives by building giant trash monuments that attract their own strange fanatics. Welcome to The Great American Suction, a frenzied portrait of struggle and collapse–and occasional resuscitation–in the ruts and nooks of a beleaguered heartland.
David Nutt is the author of The Great American Suction, published in February by Tyrant Books. His fiction has appeared in The American Reader, Electric Literature’s Okey-Panky, Green Mountains Review, Hobart, Juked, New York Tyrant, NOÖ Journal, Open City, and Washington Square Review. He attended the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, where he met his wife, the poet Gina Keicher. They live in Ithaca, New York, with their dog and two cats.
Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed, 2018) selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems and stories are forthcoming from Kenyon Review Online, Joyland, and Quarterly West, and recent work has appeared in The Paris Review; The Iowa Review; Nashville Review; Diode Poetry; Birdfeast; Adroit Journal; Forklift, Ohio; and elsewhere. Grady was born and raised in Chicago. He was a 2015-2017 Wallace Stegner Fellow, and lives in Philadelphia.
Christopher Kennedy is the author most recently of Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018) and Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011). He is one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), published as part of the Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared in many print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. In 2011, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship for Poetry. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Grady Chambers
Grady Chambers was born and raised in Chicago. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, attended the MFA program at Syracuse University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.