Book Launch, Conversation & Reading

Celebrating Jack Spicer and Poet Be Like God with Kay Gabriel, Daniel Benjamin, Sampson Starkweather & Rebecca Teich

Sat, Nov 7, 2026

7:00 PM–9:00 PM

Red Hook Books, 123 Coffey St, Brooklyn, NY 11231.

Join our friends Red Hook Books and Wesleyan University Press who have come together to celebrate the new paperback rerelease of Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham’s inimitable and rich Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, their 1998 biography of the iconoclastic poet, who often fancied himself a conduit for poetical voices beyond his physical being, whether they be radio waves or extraterrestrials. (In)famously, Spicer died young and destitute as a result of his alcoholism; “My vocabulary did this to me,” are reported to be his last words.

At 7 pm on Saturday, November 7th, a group of poets, writers, and scholars will come together at Red Hook Books to discuss Spicer, and read from his work as well as their own. Speakers include Kay Gabriel, Daniel Benjamin, and Lost & Found Editors Sampson Starkweather and Rebecca Teich.

You can learn more about the event and grab your $8 dollar ticket here. Don’t forget to get your very own copy of Poet Be Like God!

About the Participants:

Daniel Benjamin received his PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. With Kevin Killian and Kelly Holt, he edited Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). He is the author of an afterword to Spicer’s The Wasps (speCt! Books, 2016). With Eric Sneathen, he co-edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017), and with Claire Marie Stancek, he co-edited Active Aesthetics Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba Press/Giramondo, 2016). His academic articles have appeared in Jacket2, small axe, Contemporary Literature, and European Romantic Review. He teaches English at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

Rebecca Teich is a writer, curator, and PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Teich’s writing has been featured in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Kitchen Magazine, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Teich is the author of the chapbooks Vessels for Water (Belladonna*, 2026) and Caffeine Chronicles (Portable Press @ YoYo Labs, 2021), and is co-author of Shared Discernments (1080 Press, 2025) with Kimberly Alidio.

Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer based in New York. Her latest book is Perverts (Nightboat, 2025). She’s the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project and edits the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Sampson Starkweather is the author of HONEY IN THE TAPE DECK: New & Uncollected Poems, PAIN: The Board Game, The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather and over a dozen chapbooks from dangerous and/or defunct underground small presses. He is a founding editor of the anti-capitalist independent editor-run poetry press Birds, LLC. He works with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poets Document Initiative, an archival poetry publishing press from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.