BOMB All-Stars: Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey,
Jaime Manrique, Robert Polito, and Ned Sublette
The Kitchen, NYC, June 14, 2006
BOMB’s 25th Anniversary Reading

BOMB Magazine celebrated its 25th Anniversary year of publishing legendary interviews with an all-star literary line-up of its esteemed contributing editors on June 14, 2006, at The Kitchen in New York City. The event included readings by Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey, Jaime Manrique, Robert Polito, and performances by writer and musician Ned Sublette.

 

Watch Ned Sublette!

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Ned Sublette was a working musician in New York for 25 years and now devotes himself to research and writing. With a background in classical guitar and composition, he first performed at the Kitchen, at its Broome street location, in 1977. He played in ensembles led by downtown composers in the early ‘80s, including Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra and in bands led by Glenn Branca and Reese Chattam. As co-founder of the label qbadisc, he was instrumental in introducing American audiences to new music from Cuba in the early ‘90s, and produced a number of recordings by Latin and African musicians. He’s made two albums in collaboration with artist Lawrence Weiner and his song “Cowboys are frequently secretly,” written in 1981, was recently recorded by Willie Nelson. He is the author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, and The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.

 

Watch Kimiko Hahn!

Kimiko Hahn has received an American Book Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including The Artist’s Daughter, Mosquito and Ant, and The Unbearable Heart. Her newest collection, The Narrow Road to the Interior, was published in 2006 by W.W. Norton and was released in paperback in February 2008. Hahn is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College.

 

Watch Matthea Harvey!

Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry: Modern Life, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Sad Little Breathing Machine. As Wave Books editor and poet Matthew Zapruder wrote in BOMB, her poems are “full of tiny music boxes; peer into them, hear the songs, and fall into strange, glittering and familiar abysses.” Harvey is a contributing editor to jubilat and the poetry editor of American Letters & Commentary. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

 

Watch Jaime Manrique!

Jaime Manrique was born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1949. He is the author of the novels Our Lives Are the Rivers, Colombian Gold, Latin Moon in Manhattan, and Twilight at the Equator, the volume of poems My Night with Frederico Garcia Lorca, a memoir entitled A Sadness As Deep As The Sea, and a book about the Hispanic writers Arenas, Lorca, and Puig entitled Eminent Maricones. He is a frequent contributor to Salon.com and an associate professor in the MFA in writing at Columbia University.

 

Watch Robert Polito!

Robert Polito is the author of the poetry collection Doubles, and A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. His biography of Jim Thompson, Savage Art, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995. He edited the Library of America volumes Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley and New York University, and is the director of the Graduate Writing Program at The New School.

 

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