Kevin Sampsell

Well, I was planning on laying low this summer, but after updating my Events page, I realize I am actually pretty dang busy. Go check it out.

I’m also hosting an event with my fellow Future Tenser Bryan Coffelt on August 3rd at Colonel Summers Park. Outdoors! In the shade of trees! BYOB! The readers will be three of my favorite people: Amelia Gray, Matthew Simmons, and James Gendron (a poet I’m pretty obsessed with right now). Details here.

In the meantime, Mr. Coffelt and I are also putting the finishing touches on the paperback reprint of Gary Lutz’s book, Partial List of People of Bleach. It’s going to be as amazing as you’d expect a Lutz collection to be. At the same time, we’ve started work on putting together the fall Future Tense release, a collection of personal essays by Jamie Iredell. We’re still wrestling with titles ideas. Jamie will be in Portland for Wordstock and we’re hoping to have copies of his book by then (first weekend of October).

In other news, the audiobook of my memoir, A Common Pornography, was just released by Audible. If you’re an audiobook fan and aren’t hooked into Audible, you really should be. They’re producing some great stuff. They did the audio book for Chloe Caldwell too. And they’ll be doing the audio version of my novel, This Is Between Us, as well. Rumor has it, that they’re also going to do a bunch of audiobooks of the Akashic Noir series, including Portland Noir, which I edited in 2009.

Writing-wise, I seem to have picked up on some poetry mojo and have written a good dozen or more poems in the last couple of months. I read one as the surprise guest at Dena Rash Guzman’s book release party recently while Ryan Werner danced in spandex pants and cowboy boots. I ended up riding on Ryan’s shoulders by the end of the poem (it was called Rock Criticism).

I have my own page on Ink Node if you wanna read some poems. I also have some appearing soon on Sink Review and elsewhere.

In the more journalistic side of things, I also have a article in the current Poets & Writers Magazine about people who are kick-ass live readers. You gotta buy the mag to read it but they also ran this cool web-only feature with clips from the people I interviewed (Almond, Lisick, McClanahan, Heald, Zhang, Kennedy, Nutting, D. Brown).

Speaking of Alissa Nutting, I am crowning her saucy novel, Tampa, my fave of the year so far. And I talked to her about it for Tin House. That woman is tearing up the summer reading lists right about now, and for good reason.

Non-bookish stuff? TV stuff? Our household has been really into The Killing this season (the last Jonathan Demme-directed episode was amazing) as well as The Bridge and the new season of Wilfred (so depraved and funny). I also like that Amy Schumer show quite a bit. And we can’t wait for Breaking Bad, of course.

That’s all for now. Stay cool out there, friends. See you soon.