Flynn has been a ship’s captain, an electrician, and a caseworker with homeless adults. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellow Fellowship, and a PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, among various other awards and accolades.
Tickets for tonight’s reading will be available at the Box Office table at the top of the stairs to the Benaroya Recital Hall at 6pm with cash, check, or charge. Tickets for all seating levels will be available.
SAL thanks Kevin Craft, Editor of Poetry Northwest magazine, for being our guest host at the Flynn event.
Nick Flynn is a poet, playwright, and memoirist who was born and raised in Massachusetts. At the age of 27, while working at a homeless shelter in Boston, Flynn happened upon his estranged father, an alcoholic and frustrated poet. This reunion with his father later became the subject of his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), which was adapted into a film entitled Being Flynn (2012),starring Robert DeNiro and Paul Dano. His second memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (2010), details Flynn’s trip abroad with a lawyer who worked with ex-detainees of the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq.
In addition to his works of nonfiction, Flynn is the author of three poetry collections: Some Ether: Poems (2000), Blind Huber: Poems (2002), and The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands(2011). The poems in Some Ether have been described as “at once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate…” His book, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, blends his observations of the ex-detainees from his time overseas as well as Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! my Captain!” He is also the author of a play, entitled Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, which was published in 2008. Some of the venues his poems, essays and nonfiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’sThis American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film Darwin’s Nightmare (nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006).
Currently, Flynn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston each spring. During the rest of the year, he resides in Brooklyn.
