Poetry off the Shelf: Amber Tamblyn with Hannah Gamble
61 West Superior Street
Free Admission
A lifelong performer from a Hollywood family, actress Amber Tamblyn is also an established poet who has studied with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, and others. An initially casual interest in the lives and disappointments of actresses before her time—tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired Dark Sparkler, an insightful and emotionally charged collection of poetic portraits of the lives and troubling ends of more than thirty actresses. Dark Sparkler features subjects like Brittany Murphy, Marilyn Monroe, and Jane Mansfield—paired with original artwork by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tomine, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama. Tamblyn has published two previous books, Free Stallion (2005), which won the Borders Book Choice Award for Breakout Writing, and Bang Ditto (2009), an IndieNext bestseller. She lives in New York with her husband, comedian David Cross.
Tamblyn's reading from Dark Sparkler will be followed by a Q&A with Hannah Gamble, author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (2012). Gamble has received fellowships from InPrint Inc, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the University of Houston, where she served as an editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. In 2014, Gamble was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.