VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
COLEMAN: I one dressed up as a kangaroo—in long underwear and a plastic mask, holding a bottle of whiskey—for a Jonathan Lethem reading, hopped around while a band played a song from his novel, and then ended up trapped in the closet behind him while he read. Does that count?
Patrick Coleman’s debut novel, The Churchgoer, was hailed by the LA Times as “defiantly original and faithful to its literary predecessors.” His debut poetry collection, Fire Season, was written after the birth of his first child by speaking aloud into a digital audio recorder on the long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a rural neighborhood that burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007. It won the 2015 Berkshire Prize, His work has appeared in Hobart, ZYZZYVA, Zócalo Public Square, the Black Warrior Review, and the Utne Reader, among others. He earned an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from the University of California Irvine. He lives in Ramona, California and works at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego
Come see Patrick read at La Bodega Gallery in San Diego on Saturday, September 21 at 7pm