Joe Hall launches his chapbook Sun & Earth in conjunction with an art exhibition by collagist Quaid Baker Friday night at Lake Rats Dispatch on Elmwood Ave.

Thursday, Aug. 6, 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Buffalo Reading Invasion—a flash mob-like gathering to celebrate the role of books, reading, public space, and community in our lives.

Bring a book, a chair, and several friends or family members for an hour of quiet reading in one of Buffalo’s best-loved public spaces. This month’s location:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House (lawn), 125 Jewett Parkway, Buffalo, NY 14214. Visit http://buffaloreadinginvasion.com/ for additional details.

Friday, Aug. 7 p.m to 10 p.m.: Lake Rats Dispatch presents its second event in its new studio and performance space on 67 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, featuring an art exhibition from Quaid Baker entitled “Latest & Greatest,” a brand-new chapbook on the LRD imprint from Joe Hall called Sun & Earth, and music from local rock & roll wunderkind Jake King.



The Lake Rats Dispatch publishing house features a working print shop with an antique press, a small gallery that focuses on print-based art, and a retail space for posters, hard-to-find magazines, t-shirts, chapbooks, and more.



Joe will read from his work around 8pm, music to follow. Refreshments will be provided; books and artwork will be for sale, and as always, Lake Rats Dispatch Art Newspapers are free.



About The Poet



Joe Hall is the author of six books: Buffalo Free Rapid Transit (Black Ocean, 2026); People Finder, Buffalo (Cloak, 2024); Fugue and Strike (Black Ocean, 2023); Someone’s Utopia (Black Ocean, 2018); The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean, 2013); and Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean, 2010).



With Chad Hardy, he co-authored The Container Store Vols I & II (2012). With Cheryl Quimba, he co-authored the chapbook May I Softly Walk (2014). Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and/or rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. He participates in Hostile Books, a publishing collective dedicated to radical materiality, with Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong.

Hall is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Bonaventure University. He has taught community based creative writing workshops through the Worker Center in Buffalo and Just Buffalo Literary Center. His college teaching experience includes all levels of undergraduate creative writing and environmental literature. He is frequently amazed by his students.

In 2018, Hall received a PhD in Literature from the University at Buffalo, SUNY upon completion of his dissertation on liquid commons in eighteenth-century literature. The Journal of Post Colonial Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction have published his articles on literature, water, waste, and imperialism. His essays and reviews have appeared in Annulet, Terrain.org, The Colorado Review, and Fence Digital. His current research project involves settler colonial aesthetics in modern American ecopoetics.