The So and So Series Reading No. 15 The Distillery Era Begins Held at the Distillery in South Boston, MA on July 21, 2007 The So and So Series has moved to the Distillery, and with it we've joined forces with Rope-A-Dope Press the Manilla Broadsides. Poets this month are Shafer Hall, Cecily Parks, and Ravi Shankar! Order of Events: 00:00 Intro of Poets and Rope-A-Dope collaboration on by host and curator Chris Tonelli 02:11 Shafer Hall 19:45 Cecily Parks 32:36 Ravi Shankar For more information on the Manila Broadsides, a project that combines visual art and poetry, visit: http://manilabroadsides.blogspot.com/ For more information on Rope-A-Dope Press, our great collaborators, visit: http://rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com/ This Month's Poets: Shafer Hall is a senior poetry editor for Painted Bride Quarterly, a poetry curator and host for the Frequency Reading Series, and a poetry bartender for poets in New York, but mostly he's a poetry writer from Texas who loves to write poetry. His poems and collaborations have appeared in the Indiana Review, Eyeshot.net, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and many other journals. He is currently working on "NoTell Ro*Tel," an epic poem detailing his devotion to Reb Livingston and to canned tomatoes. Cecily Parks's first collection of poems, Field Folly Snow, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. Her chapbook, Cold Work, was selected by Li-Young Lee for the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Bronx Writers' Center, The MacDowell Colony, and the Ucross Foundation. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards and co-authored a chapbook with Reb Livingston, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books). His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Massachusetts Review, Fulcrum, McSweeney's and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among many others. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has appeared as a commentator on NPR and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark's Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, is co-editing an anthology of contemporary South Asian, East Asian Poetry, due out with W.W. Norton & Co. in Spring 2008.