Reading of the original play Caliban and the First Tourist Luau by Mark Tjarks on November 29th 
The ARTS at Marks Garage is hosting a series of Tuesday night play readings called PlayBuilders’ Tuesday Night Da Kine Readers Theatre! and one play by Hawai’i Pacific University English professor Mark Tjarks has been included. In this event, selected actors will be reading the original plays. Caliban and the First Tourist Luau, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic The Tempest, is scheduled for November 29th at 7:30PM. The Playbuilders Festival opens November 8th, and continues on November 22nd, November 29th, December 6th, and December 13th, all beginning at 7:30PM. Tickets are $5 at the door and will be sold one hour prior to showtime. Refreshments will also be served. Reservations may be made in advance by calling Terri Madden at 218-0103. For the schedule of plays go to www.playbuilders.org and check under “Current Production.” For more information about the event, click here for flyer.
Adele Ne Jame Participates in the Event “Tea Farm Reading”
English professor and poet Adele Ne Jame is participating in Tea Farm Reading on October 22 on Puck’s Alley (2600 South King St. #106). Other participants include Perle Besserman, Pat Matsueda, and Melanie Van Der Tuin. The readings will begin at 5:00PM with a reception before it at 4:30. Click here for flyer and more information about the event.
Tyler McMahon's Novel How the Mistakes Were Made to be Published by St. Martin's Press 
HPU Assistant Professor Tyler McMahon is the author of How the Mistakes Were Made, to be published Oct. 11, 2011.
Synopsis
Laura Loss came of age in the hardcore punk scene of the 1980s, the jailbait bassist in her brother Anthony's band. But a decade after tragedy destroyed Anthony and their iconic group, she finds herself serving coffee in Seattle.
While on a reluctant tour through Montana, she meets Sean and Nathan, two talented young musicians dying to leave their small mountain town. Nathan proves to be a charismatic songsmith. Sean has a neurological condition known as synesthesia, which makes him a genius on lead guitar. With Laura's guidance, the three of them become the Mistakes—accidental standard-bearers for the burgeoning "Seattle Sound."
As the band graduates from old vans and darkened bars to tour-buses and stadiums, there's no time to wonder whether stardom is something they want—or can handle. At the height of their fame, the volatile bonds between the three explode in a toxic cloud of love and betrayal. The world blames Laura for the band's demise. Hated by the fans she's spent her life serving, she finally tells her side of how the Mistakes were made.
Reviews
"I loved this book — the pace builds quickly as you turn the pages faster and faster to discover imminent train wrecks, cleverly foreshadowed. Dueling settings of the early 80's hardcore era and the early 90's grunge era are set back to back ending in a scandalously destructive grand finale. Secrets are revealed one by one, cautiously, like a well-played hand of poker. This was one wild ride: a well-researched tale of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll and possible redemption."
-Sean Yseult of White Zombie
"Through its vivid rendering of both eighties hardcore and nineties grunge, this novel reveals the music world as a site of redemption and destruction. Through its brilliant portrayal of flawed heroine Laura Loss, it depicts the human heart as a source of weakness and strength. The first makes this a great rock-and-roll novel. The second makes it a great novel."
-Elise Blackwell, author of Hunger and An Unfinished Score
"...a novel that captures the gorgeous, messy, heartbreaking history of the indie rock revolution like lightning in a jar. And like any great pop song, it's a story that soars from hook to killer hook, never letting you go."
-Alina Simone, author of You Must Go and Win
"With the velocity and conviction and frenetic pace of a punk anthem, McMahon has captured perfectly the life cylce of a rock and roll band in all its exhilarating and destructive glory. How the Mistakes Were Made is fast, furious, and un-put-downable."
-Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here and All about Lulu
"Truly wonderful, incredibly rich and exciting, and a tremendous slice of neon and spit and sensuality and dank, beautiful longing for the nearly-forgotten burn of punk."
-J. Reuben Appelman, author of Make Loneliness
Adele Ne Jame Releases Her Newest Book The South Wind 
HPU Assistant English Professor Adele Ne Jame is the author of The South Wind, published August 2011 by El Leon Literray Arts in collaboration with Manoa Books.
About the Author
Adele Ne Jame is the author of Inheritance, Field Work, and Poems, Land & Spirit. Recipient of a Pablo Neruda prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry, she teaches at Hawai'i Pacific University.
Reviews
"The South Wind blows the reader back and forth between the living and the dead, between the Middle East and Middle Pacific, between love lost and spirit gained. Adele Ne Jame's angels bridge the chasms, but in this haunting collection she, too, has 'eyes for wings'. Like her night heron at the edge of the water, she offers us 'beauty if not redemption' and guides us toward 'the roar on the other side of silence.'" -Christine Hemp, author of That Fall
"A soft melody breezes through these perfectly crafted poems located in New Jersey, in Hawai'i and in Lebanon, as if to whisper khalleek hown, stay here. Ne Jame's collections is a souful search for place, for time, for identity, weaving meaning from memory and exahalting in the discovery of home." -Elise Salem, author of Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives
"Distilling the bittersweet, capturing what it means to be creatures in love with a fleeting world of wonders—this is the specialty of poets. Adele Ne Jame's poems are lovely examples of the art.
In this beautiful collection, Ne Jame moves among loved ones and landscapes as disparate as New Jersey, Hawaii, and Lebanon. Her continuous awareness of the overlapping realms of life and death is what gives this book its emotional heft. Blasted by war, by infidelity, by age and its discouragements, families, cities, and cultures live on, claiming happiness where they can.
Lebanon—torn apart by war multiple times in Ne Jame's lifetime—gets special attention here, from the poems and also from a lengthy afterword by Hayan Charara. It is a landscape perfectly suited to Ne Jame's work, attentive as it is to both the presence and the absence of the dead. This is poetry of place that makes one wonder: what did place teach the poet, and what does the poet's eye illuminate in the place?
What a pity there are so few poems here: only fifteen, but each beautifully wrought. Ne Jame's imagery is lush, her control spot on, and her clear, reverent voice will leave the reader breathless. These poems are solidly rooted in the world but always aware of other worlds: the past, the wild realm of angels—"the roar on the other side of silence"—and of what we are continuously making of our lives.
Adele Ne Jame teaches at Hawaii Pacific University. She is the recipient of several prizes, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and has published three previous collections, including Field Work. Her poems have been anthologized in collections of Arab American poetry.
Both seasoned readers and those new to poetry will enjoy this book: these are accessible poems with great emotional rewards, and the Afterword provides helpful context. The range of topics—elegies, an outdoor concert, a bombed statue, a rain forest cabin, even the possibility of love—are united by a lingering, elegant tone. These poems are like the "blasted roses / in the rock gardens that are gathered by / villagers and distilled into perfumed / water to wash the bodies of the dead."
Ne Jame believes "nothing can save us from / what hourly we are making or unmaking." Here there is no escape, and perhaps no mercy, either. But there is abundant beauty, and a will to live fully. As she writes: 'like the fields of / the wild red anemone, we are waving / our songs in the air before night falls.'" -Teresa Scollon, writer for ForeWord Book Reviews
ForeWord Book Reviews goes out to 15,000 librarians and independent book sellers and others.
Praise for Field Work, a first book of poems by Adele Ne Jame
“Both siren song and siren wooing, Adele Ne Jame’s poetry draws its ambiance and evocative landscapes from two exotic currents, which she weaves together in a seamless flow: memories of her Arabic family and heritage and details of her adult life lived in such geographical locations as Hawai‘i and the South Sea islands. This is authentic love poetry: love of persons, places and particulars rendered in sensuous imagery and exquisite music.” -Jack Marshall
Praise for Field Work, a first book of poems by Adele Ne Jame
“Adele Ne Jame’s poems, like the lush uplands of Hawai’i or the jungles of Papau New Guinea, are mysterious, beautiful, and haunted. To read them is to travel through language to a place where what was hidden reveals itself as both spectacular and panoramic.” -Kelly Cherry
“With her deep intelligence and fierce emotional power, Adele Ne Jame explores the erotic and exotic in poems that resonate long in the memory and imagination. Her imagination is dense and richly textured. Field Work is the work of a truly original new voice: a one-of-a-kind wonder.” -Ronald Wallace
“This is an auspicious first volume of poems. Adele Ne Jame gives us landscapes rich in feeling, articulated in language that is at the same time delicate and powerful. We must hope for more work soon from this mature and gifted poet.” -Gene Frumkin
Book Reviews
http://forewordreviews.com/reviews/the_south_wind/
Exhibit sponsored by the Hawaii Conservation Alliance features poetry of Adele Ne Jame
The opening reception of Splendor: Portraits of the Natural World, an exhibit of Melissa Chimera’s large-format paintings of rare plants and animals of the State Natural Area Reserve System, will feature poet and HPU professor Adele Ne Jame reading from her work. Ne Jame will read poems inspired by the remote Hawaiian wilderness from her new book, The South Wind, and from her 2009 collaboration with Chimera, "Land and Spirit."
The reception, scheduled for July 27, 2011 6-8 p.m. at the Arts at Marks Garage is free and open to the public. The exhibit is open from July 26-August 13.
This project is the Hawai‘i Conservation Conference's annual “Conservation Through Art” exhibition. Recognizing that art is a powerful means to connect the community to conservation, the HCA sponsors an exhibit to allow participants the opportunity to share artists’ awareness of and appreciation for Hawai‘i’s natural environment.
Play by Mark Tjarks Selected for Houston Play Festival
Imposter, a play by HPU English Professor and playwright Mark Tjarks, was selected for a staged reading by Theatre Southwest in Houston, Texas. The one-time performance of 5-to-15-minute plays took place on March 13, 2011, at the 6th Annual Readers Theatre Festival. Over 100 short plays were submitted this year.
Tjarks' plays have been performed by Kuma Kahua Theatre, The ARTS at Marks Garage, Women in Theatre on Kauai, and the Original Play Festival XVI in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island.
Tyler McMahon Reports on Teaching Creative Writing to Inmates
During the fall of 2010, I taught a ten-week workshop in Fiction Writing at Halawa Correctional Facility. I’d wanted to teach Creative Writing in prison for a while, and finally got in touch with the director of the Learning Center at HCF. In many ways, the course was similar to the workshops I teach at HPU; it consisted mainly of readings, discussions, and in-class writing workshops. Due to the rules, we did a great deal of reading aloud. At the end of the term, each of my students turned in an original short story. I compiled their stories into an online anthology called The Halawa Review—which will be published as soon as the administrative and legal hurdles are cleared. I have tentative plans to teach another workshop at HCF in the fall.
Hawai'i Pacific University
