Two very good friends of mine have recently had books published, one non-fiction and one fiction, and I highly recommend that you pick them up. You can get both of them on Amazon (use the links below) or at most decent bookstores.
Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam
by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
I actually appear prominently in Words In Your Face (Chapter 18), at the center of one of the two key controversies that led to the expansion of the poetry slam beyond the confines of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and Cristin did a great job of editing our rambling interview into something coherent and, if I say so myself, entertaining and enlightening. The whole book is a great read, as Eileen Tabios pointed out: “It’s about poetry slam — but has all the elements of a great story; writes itself really….with the vagaries of ego, passion, literature, vendettas, rivalries, and love love love for poetry really uplifting what may have been individual petty incidents into necessary threads to a glorious fabric…you get the yarn drift. Highly recommended, as they say.”
Bonus: Check out my interview with Cristin about the book over at Spindle
Almost Home
by Jessica Blank
Almost Home is Jessica’s debut novel, but you might remember her name from the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway play The Exonerated. Telling the overlapping stories of seven teenage runaways in Hollywood, her prose is brisk and riveting, getting into each character’s head to varying degrees while spicing their haunting narratives with precise bits of dialogue, never sainting or damning any of them for their actions, or inactions. Don’t let the “Young Adult” label or the misleading cover fool you, either; this isn’t High School Musical or an After School Special. What it is is highly recommended.
