Wednesday Night Poetry to feature Sibling Rivalry Press editors
Two editors, Seth Pennington and Kate Leland, from Little Rock’s Sibling Rivalry Press will be featured this week during Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave. The regular open mic session for all poets will begin at 6:30 p.m. and the feature will be at 7 p.m., followed by another open mic session. Admission is free and open to all ages.
Pennington co-owns Sibling Rivalry Press with his husband, Bryan Borland, and serves as the editor-in-chief. The company began in 2010. Since then the titles they have published have won numerous awards including the Push Cart Prize and Lambda Award and have been included in Poets & Writers lists for top debut fiction and poetry books. Pennington was recently honored by the Library of Congress for his layout work on the book “Joy Exhaustible.” He holds a B.A. in English from University of Arkansas at Little Rock where he received the Richard Stanley Cooper Literary Award.
Before he started writing poetry, Pennington wrote songs. “… as a teenager while on the riding mower I would belt them out over the engine,” he said in a news release. “Then I would rush in and write them down after I was finished.” He credits Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as his early influences. “That’s when I began to write poems. But even now everything still has melody.”
Sibling Rivalry Press will release Pennington’s first poetry book, “Tertulia,” on April 28, but he will have copies for sale at the event on Wednesday.
Leland is an associate editor with SRP and received her B.A. in creative writing from Hendrix College in Conway in spring 2016. A native of Austin, Texas, Leland grew up in a large home filled with books, even in the closets. Her mother, who was an ex-ballerina and book publicist, would read to her and her younger sister at night even as they were teenagers. Shel Silverstein was one of her favorites. Her younger sister will graduate this spring from the University of Texas with a B.A. in film and creative writing.
Leland started college as a chemistry major, but early in her freshman year she saw a black and white video of Anis Mojgani performing the poem “Shake The Dust.” She said in the release, “I fell badly and quickly in love. I played that video 19 times in my dorm room that night.” Shortly after that she changed her major to English. In her senior year one of her professors described Leland’s poetry as “counter phobic, as in one who does not flee from her phobias but embraces them.”
Headmistress Press released Leland’s first book of poetry, “I Wore The Only Garden I’ve Ever Grown,” in January. In a review of the book SRP publisher Borland wrote, “This garden is the reality of wreckage, the salvaged self of a girl becoming a woman.” Copies of the book will be available Wednesday night.
In addition to their jobs at Sibling, both Pennington and Leland work for separate law firms in Little Rock.
Email budonfoot@yahoo.com for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.