Alameda County Poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg
On Thursday, January 16, at 7:30pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature Alameda Poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg. The reading will take place at the Arena Market Cafe and will begin with live improv jazz and an open mic with jazz improv; the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is a poet and short fiction writer. His books of poetry include Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, 2012), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery (2007), Good Morning! (2011) and The Sound of Music (2015). In November 2019, Nomadic Press will publish his collection of prose poems and microfictions, Animal Children. In 2020, Doubleback books will reprint The Opposite of Work.
In 2015 his short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and has appeared in Literary Hub's "11 Very Short Stories You Must Read Immediately" and Electric Literature's "7 Flash Fiction Stories That Are Worth (a Tiny Amount of) Your Time", as well as in the syllabi of numerous college classes. His story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018.
He is the author of two libretti: Terrible Things Will Happen But It's Going to Be Okay: A Donner Party Opera with composer Guillermo Galindo, and a children's opera based on the Chinese folktale, The Clever Wife, which was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera for their Opera to Go series. Behm–Steinberg also performs improvised experimental music utilizing vocal samples, digital turntables and effects pedals, working on text/sound art projects with Matt Davignon and others under the bandname Oa and the How Are You Feeling Project. He is a regular at the monthly improvised music workshop, Doors That Only Open In Silence.
He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. For the past twenty years he's taught in the writing and literature and MFA writing programs at California College of the Arts, teaching courses in creative writing and literature, with a growing emphasis on science fiction, fantasy, horror, the weird, the strange, the experimental, the unclassifiable.
From 2007-2017 he served as Faculty Editor of Eleven Eleven, where he published close to 1200 writers, artists and translations. He is currently the Chief Steward of CCA's Adjunct Faculty Union, SEIU 1021.
Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, many anonymous donors, and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
Things
The older children are nervous about the newer children. When we take them to the nursery, they sob louder than the babies.
“There are so many of them,” they cry. “How much love will you have left for us?”
We look around in our bags, pull out toys and makeup and tissues and car keys, and they say, “Things? Things! You think we’re going to mistake shoddy materialisms for love?”
And the babies say to their brothers and sisters, “In time, eventually, you will.”
A kid tugs at my arm, she says, “You better be carrying a puppy in that bag of yours.”
Hugh Behm-Steinberg
