Small Presses and Little Magazines in New York in the 1970s
Johnny Stanton, writer and publisher; Elinor Nauen, poet and teacher
Wed, 3/27 · 4:30 pm—6:00 pm · Firestone Library, Special Collections, C-Floor
Department of English; Humanities Council; Princeton University Library Special Collections.
An oral history in connection with the graduate seminar “Postwar New York,” organized by Joshua Kotin and sponsored by Postwar New York: Workshops, a Humanities Council Magic Grant for Innovation, and the Department of English.
To attend this event, please register, as Special Collections has limited space.
Johnny Stanton was born in 1943 in Manhattan, the son of Irish immigrants from Galway. He was an altar boy and Eagle Scout who attended Catholic schools & eventually graduated from Columbia University, where he fell in with many poets and writers of the New York School, including Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Paul Auster. He published many of them, some for the first time, in his Siamese Banana Press, which started as a newspaper in 1972 and ended as a performance gang in 1978. He is the author of many short stories and the novel Mangled Hands, neglected by critics yet highly acclaimed by the readers who discover it. He has lived in the East Village for 30 years with his wife, the poet Elinor Nauen, a cat (currently Lefty), and a lot of art.
Elinor Nauen’s books include My Marriage A to Z: A Big-City Romance, So Late into the Night, Cars and Other Poems, American Guys, and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road (Faber & Faber, 1997) and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball (Faber & Faber, 1994). Her work has appeared in New American Writing, FICTION, Exquisite Corpse, The World, KOFF, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been a teacher/guest lecturer in writing workshops and classes in colleges, secondary and primary schools, and adult workshops at the Pingry School, Martinsville, NJ, where she was the visiting poet for several years; Washington State University, University of South Dakota, and elsewhere. She is a member of PEN American Center and on the board of directors of The Poetry Project. She blogs at www.elinornauen.com/blog.
Cosponsored by the Humanities Council and Princeton University Library Special Collections.
