An Evening with Bryan Borland

With musical guest John Willis!

October 24, 2019Doors open at 6pm. Show starts at 7pm.$35/ticket (includes dinner & the show). Cash bar. Location: The Joint Theater and Coffeehouse301 Main St, North Little Rock, AR 72114

The AIDS epidemic silenced a generation of talented writers and artists. In 1995, poet Karl Tierney, a graduate of the University of Arkansas’s master’s program in creative writing, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge after being rejected from a trial AIDS-treatment study that would have extended his life. Now, 24 years later, Argenta’s own Sibling Rivalry Press is bringing the world the book he dreamed of publishing. Join Sibling Rivalry Press founding publisher Bryan Borland, himself a Lambda Literary Award-Finalist and American Library Association-honored poet, as he tells Karl’s story and reads the poems he left behind. Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland, says: “Reading Karl Tierney’s collection is like entering a portal into San Francisco in the ’80s and ’90s, a time when it was still dirty and sexy and alive, even as men across the city were dying. With sharp intimacy, Tierney’s poems had me laughing and crying in recognition for all that we lost. This is vital reading.”

Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including Berkeley Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He published more than 50 poems before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995. He was 39 years old.

Bryan Borland is publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press, an independent publishing house based in the Argenta Arts District of North Little Rock, Arkansas. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently DIG, published by George Mason University’s Stillhouse Press, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry and a Stonewall Honor Book in Literature as selected by the American Library Association.