Publishing, Old Town Music Hall
He left The Paperman in 1975 to become editor of Aura Literary Arts Review at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, publishing work by Yukio Mishima (Japan), Diane Wakoski, and features on Robert Bly, Howard Nemerov, the American Prose Poem and Southern culture and literature. The same year he also founded a small literary press, Thunder City Press, which eventually became Ford-Brown & Co., Publishers, and continued to publish books until 1995. Over a twenty-year period his two publishing houses published anthologies, broadsides, chapbooks, books and magazines that included literary work by John Beecher, Richard Brautigan, Pier Giorgio DiCicco (Canada), Bei Dao (China), Mark Doty, Odysseus Elytis (Greece), Charles Gaines, Andrew Glaze, Günter Grass (Germany), Gail Godwin, Enrique Anderson Imbert (Argentina), Carolyn Kizer, John Logan, Larry McMurtry. Vassar Miller, Pablo Neruda (Chile), Sonia Sanchez, Gerald Stern, Georg Trakl (Austria), Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden), Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Russia) and Paul Zimmer.
With Birmingham writer Danny Gamble in 1980 he founded the Old Town Music and Reading series on Morris Avenue off of 20th Street North in downtown Birmingham. The founding of this performance series was the culmination of a number of years of sponsorship by Brown of conferences, readings and music performances by Birmingham artists. Brown and Gamble coordinated with Drew Tombrello, owner of The Old Town Music Hall, to present performances to packed audiences three times a year. Performers included many local musician and writers, such as The Broken Hearts, Johnny Coley, Lolly Lee, Charles Muse, The Ray Reach Group, Dale Short, Michael Swindle and Macey Taylor. There were also periodic performances and readings by such notable musicians and writers as Mose Allison, Michael Harper, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Shirley Williams and Larry Jon Wilson.
Read more about this topic: Steven Ford Brown
Famous quotes containing the words town, music and/or hall:
“Americans living in Latin American countries are often more snobbish than the Latins themselves. The typical American has quite a bit of money by Latin American standards, and he rarely sees a countryman who doesn’t. An American businessman who would think nothing of being seen in a sport shirt on the streets of his home town will be shocked and offended at a suggestion that he appear in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in anything but a coat and tie.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The actors today really need the whip hand. They’re so lazy. They haven’t got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)