Vegetarian Alcoholic Poetry Reading

press release: Milwaukee’s Vegetarian Alcoholic Press will hold a poetry reading featuring five writers it has published on Friday, June 9th. The event is set to occur that night at Mother Fools Coffeehouse, 1101 Williamson St. in Madison from 8-10pm.  This will be the first official reading the press has held in Madison during its three-year run.

The featured readers of the evening consist of emerging poets Nathan Fredrick (aka Freddy La Force, Milwaukee), Georgia Lundeen (Minneapolis), Bethany Price (Milwaukee), Troy Schoultz (Oshkosh), and Kelly Sexton (La Crosse). All five poets vary in style from frank to mythical to macabre.

Nathan Fredrick is the pen name of Freddy La Force, publisher and editor at Vegetarian Alcoholic. He has produced 11 books for the label since 2014, including two containing his own words, Parallelograms (with Heidi Koos, 2014) and Fall Catalogue (2016). He most recently edited an anthology of 47 Milwaukee poets, Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters.

Georgia Lundeen has a taste for the mythical but always writes sincerely. Her bold use of traditional meter and occasionally even (gasp) rhyme should not frighten the poetry aficionado as her lines are both surprising and congruent.  She self-published her first children’s book, Love Like Us, with Alexandra L. Hemrick in 2014. Her first full-length collection of poetry, spare, was released by Vegetarian Alcoholic in April 2017. More of her poems can be found at sparepoetry.com 

Bethany Price holds a degree in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She doesn’t own a watch but is obsessed with time and its great tragedies. Her poems appear online in BlazeVOX, Media Schmedia, and 2River. She lives in Milwaukee and walks around with no shoes fairly often. She has a chapbook through pity milk press in 2013 called All I Wanna Do and a book through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2014 entitled Terror. She is an actress occasionally. Bethany edits articles for The Art Shore, a local arts blog started by Jerrod Johnson.  She also appears in the anthology Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters.

Troy Schoultz is a lifelong Wisconsin resident.  He is currently a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley, where he also edits the nationally recognized Fox Cry Review.  His interests and influences include garage rock, vinyl LPs, found objects, the paranormal, abandoned places, folklore, old cemeteries and the number five.  His poems, stories, and reviews have all appeared in Seattle Review, Nerve Cowboy, Rattle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Word Riot, Fish Drum, Midwestern Gothic and several others since 1997.  He was nominated in 2012 for a Pushcart Prize by Slipstream literary magazine, and is the author of two chapbooks, A Field of Bonfires Sings (Wolf Angel Press, 1999) and Good Friday (Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, 2005). His first full collection, Biographies of Runaway Dogs, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic in 2016. He currently resides in Oshkosh, WI.

Kelly Sexton holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, is the former poetry editor for Bombay Gin, and loves asparagus. She has been published in Monkey Puzzle, Touchstone, Apothecary, Species, and other journals and zines. Her book Vodka Mountain or I’m Bad at This Game will be released in September by Vegetarian Alcoholic. Her poems can be found online at http://bukowskirat.blogspot.com