EventsCommon Ground#733

Publishing-in-Transit: Seven Stories Press

Featuring Daniel Simon, Lee Stringer, Allison Tamarkin Paller, Alex DiFrancesco, Ruth Weiner, and Cole Swensen, with Nana-Ama Danquah

Thursday, January 26, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Seven Stories Press Founder and Publisher Daniel Simon, author Lee Stringer, Seven Stories Web Manger Allison Tamarkin Paller, and Triangle Square Books Publisher Ruth Weiner join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Nana-Ama Danquah.

In this Talk

Daniel Simon

Portrait by Phong H. Bui

Daniel Simon is the founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. He is the co-author, with Jack Hoffman, of Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman and translator of Van Gogh: Self Portraits by Pascal Bonafoux.

Lee Stringer

Caverly (aka “Lee”) Stringer is the author of breakout Seven Stories Press memoirs Grand Central Winter: Stories From the Street (a New York Times & USA Today top 10 notable book), Sleepaway School: Stories From a Boy’s Life, and (with Kurt Vonnegut) Like Shaking Hands With God: a Conversation About Writing. Stringer is a two-time recipient of the Washington Irving Award, a 1998 Murray Kempton Journalism Award, and a 2002 Lannan Foundation Writing Retreat. A former editor of and columnist for Street News, his essays and articles have since appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Journal News, Newsday, Reader’s Digest, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Alternate, among others.

https://www.sevenstories.com/authors/236-lee-stringer

Allison Tamarkin Paller

Allison Tamarkin Paller is the web manager for Seven Stories Press. She lives in Ridgewood, Queens, with her partner, her cat named Soup, and her dog named Snake.

Alex DiFrancesco

Alex DiFrancesco has published fiction and nonfiction in The Carolina Quarterly, The New Ohio Review, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. In addition to their story collection, Transmutation (Seven Stories Press), and their forthcoming memoir Breaking the Curse (Seven Stories), DiFrancesco is the author of All City: A Novel (Seven Stories), Psychopomps (The Accomplices), and Bird is the Word: The Iggy and Biggy Cycle (Bone and Ink Press). Winner of Sundress Academy for the Arts’ 2017 OutSpoken contest for LGBTQ+ writing, DiFrancesco was a finalist in Cosmonaut Avenue’s inaugural non-fiction prize. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, The Heart podcast, and elsewhere.

https://alexdifrancesco.com/

Ruth Weiner

Ruth Weiner has worked at book publishers Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Henry Holt and Co, and as a longtime freelance publicist and consultant for many other publishers and authors. In true indie press fashion she wears several hats at Seven Stories Press including publicity director and publisher of the children’s imprint, Triangle Square Books for Young Readers.

https://www.sevenstories.com/imprints/triangle-square

Cole Swensen

Photo by Anthony Hayward

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨