The Launch Party for Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats took place on Sunday, April 8 at the Weehawken Writers and Artists Studio. The event included author signings, reading and performances from Echo in Four Beats, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebooks for Creative Writing, and poetry and fiction performances from writers Dallas Athent, Jonah Kruvant, and the editors of Quiet Lunch. A gallery of the Echo in Four Beats festivities follows below:
Book Tour for Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats & CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing
Interested in getting a signed copy of Rita Banerjee’s new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018) or edited volume CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018) and meeting the author? If so, check out the book tour and signing schedule for Echo in Four Beats and CREDO below:
Thursday July 28, 2018:
Paris Lit Up featuring Rita Banerjee
Culture Rapide * 8:45 – 11:00 pm
103 rue Julien Lacroix,75020 Paris, France
Saturday June 2, 2018
The Munich Readery Presents:
Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats
The Munich Readery * 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Augustenstr. 104, Munich, Germany
Saturday June 2, 2018:
Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Reading &
CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos Workshop
Grolier Poetry Festival – 90th Anniversary Celebration
Plympton Street, Between Mass Ave & Bow Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA * 2:40 – 4:15 pm
Friday April 20, 2018:
Disobedient Futures
A Split This Rock Off-Site Reading
Colony Club * 5:30-7:30pm
3118 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20010
Sunday April 8, 2018:
Echo in Four Beats Launch Party
Weehawken Writers and Artists Studio * 6-9 pm
10 Louisa Pl, Weehawken, NJ, 07086
Friday April 7, 2018:
Echo in Four Beats at First Fridays
The Zeitgeist Outpost * 7-8 pm
186 ½ Hampshire St., Cambridge, MA 02139
Tuesday March 27, 2018:
Public Reading & Q&A with Rita Banerjee
New Hampshire Institute of Art * 5:30-8:30 pm
148 Concord St, Manchester, NH 03104
Saturday March 10, 2018:
Echo in Four Beats Signing
Finishing Line Press Table (T743) * 1-2 pm
AWP 2018 Bookfair, Tampa Convention Center
333 S Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
Friday March 9, 2018:
Spontaneous Reading Party
Celebrating the Pre-Launch of CREDO
Centre for Women * 7:00 – 11:00 pm
305 S Hyde Park Ave, Tampa, FL 33606
Friday March 9, 2018:
CREDO Authors’ Signing
Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Table (T403) * 2-4 pm
AWP 2018 Bookfair, Tampa Convention Center
333 S Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
Friday March 9, 2018:
Echo in Four Beats Signing
Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Table (T403) * 1-2 pm
AWP 2018 Bookfair, Tampa Convention Center
333 S Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
Thursday March 8, 2018:
CREDO Editors’ Signing
C&R Press Booth (1036) * 2-3 pm
AWP 2018 Bookfair, Tampa Convention Center
333 S Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
April 8, 6-9 pm: Echo in Four Beats Launch Party at the Weehawken Writers and Artists Studio!
Sunday, April 8 * 6-9 pm
Weehawken Writers & Artists Studio
10 Louisa Pl., Weehawken, NJ 07086
Admission: Free
The Weehawken Writers & Artists Studio is delighted to host the launch party of Rita Banerjee’s debut poetry collection Echo in Four Beats !
Combining elements, rhythms, and personas from American jazz, blues, and ragtime, poet Rita Banerjee presents a modern-day spin on the love story of Echo and Narcissus in her debut full-length poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats . But in this story, told in four parts, Echo is more than just a fragment, she is a Sapphic voice that speaks, foretells, forestalls, and repeats.Echo in Four Beats, which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, the Three Mile Harbor Book Prize, the Aquarius Press/Willow Books Literature Award, was released by Finishing Line Press this March!
Books will be be available for purchase and signing by Rita!
Readings by: Rita Banerjee, Dallas Athent, Jonah Kruvant, and more!
About the Author:
Rita Banerjee
is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She is the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest, and she is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.
April 8, 2-4 pm: Literary Manifestos and What’s at Stake Workshop at the Weehawken Writers and Artists Studio
Literary Manifestos & What’s at Stake Workshop
Sunday, April 8 * 2-4 pm * Admission: $30
Weehawken Writers & Artists Studio
10 Louisa Pl., Weehawken, NJ 07086
The Weehawken Writers & Artists Studio is delighted to host a creative writing workshop on Literary Manifestos & What’s at Stake Workshop!
CREDO. I believe. No other statement is so full of intent and subversion and power. A Credo is a call to arms. It is a declaration. A Credo is the act of an individual pushing back against society, against established stigmas, taboos, values, and norms. A Credo provokes. It desires change. A Credo is an artist or community challenging dogma, and putting oneself on the front line. A Credo is art at risk. A Credo can be a marker of revolution. A Credo, is thus, the most calculating and simple form of a manifesto. In this creative writing workshop, writers will get a chance to create their own literary manifestos and discuss what’s at stake in their own writing, art, and craft. We will read literary manifestos and poetry from writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Amiri Baraka, and Bianca Stone, and will explore how writers and readers become more invested in a work of writing, its performance, and its narrative by raising the stakes.
About the Instructor:
Rita Banerjee
is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She is the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest, and she is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.
Melissa Grunow Reviews Echo in Four Beats on The Coil
Poet and writer Melissa Grunow reviews Rita Banerjee’s debut poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats for The Coil Journal. In her review, entitled “On Rita Banerjee’s ‘Echo in Four Beats,'” Grunow writes:
In her debut poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats, Rita Banerjee demonstrates mastery of controlled language and shrewd observation. From depictions of the world’s smallest fragments of wonder to an investigation of its vast expansiveness, Banerjee’s breadth of intrinsic compassion reverberates in each poem.
A finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, Echo in Four Beats conveys an understanding of nature, human connection, literary and historical novelties, and intercontinental divides unlike any other.
Each poem is unique and compelling in its voice and persona, identities that shapeshift and morph across state lines, borderlands, and oceans. There is agility to the lyricism, images taking shape among lines that swing like pendulums and pivot like spinning tops. Stanzas are built with intentional precision that will drop you into the moments of experience, scrutiny, and enchantment that shudder and reverberate.
Read Grunow’s full review of Echo in Four Beats here, and order Echo in Four Beats (March 9, 2018) from Finishing Line Press here.
Visiting Writer Rita Banerjee at the New Hampshire Institute of Art
Rita Banerjee will be a Visiting Writer at the New Hampshire Institute of Art this Spring. She will be lecturing and giving workshops on topics such as “Rasa: Emotion and Suspense in Theatre, Poetry, and (Non)Fiction,” “Poetry and What’s at Stake,” and “Revising, Pitching, and Publishing” at NHIA on Tuesday, March 27. In addition, she will be holding a discussion with Ayris editors and staff on Tuesday, March 27. Rita Banerjee will also be reading from her debut poetry collection Echo in Four Beats at the French Hall Rotunda at NHIA from 5:30-7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 27, 2018. The poetry reading and Q&A for Echo in Four Beats is free and open to the public.
Echo Speaks: Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats Interview feat. in Manchester’s The Hippo
Rita Banerjee will be a Visiting Artist at the New Hampshire Institute of Art this Spring, and will be reading from her debut poetry collection Echo in Four Beats at the French Hall Rotunda at NHIA from 5:30-7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 27, 2018.
Rita Banerjee’s poetry debut Echo in Four Beats was featured on New Hampshire Weekly’s The Hippo today. In the article, entitled “Echo Speaks,” journalist Angie Sykeny interviews Rita Banerjee about her new collection of poems, and discusses gender roles, feminism, and speech acts with the author. Here’s a short excerpt from the interview below:
The New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester welcomes a special guest writer, Rita Banerjee, on Tuesday, March 27, for a reading, signing and discussion of her debut collection of poetry, Echo in Four Beats, released earlier this month.
What is the idea behind Echo in Four Beats?
It dreams of a common language. What happens when people from different backgrounds and places of power, with different ideas of masculinity and femininity, come together … and figure out how to connect, despite language barriers, and despite defined roles? How do they find ways to support that female agency and the female gaze?
What would you like readers to take away from Echo in Four Beats?
I would like readers to kind of interrogate their own power and find where and how they can express their own voice. It doesn’t have to be in proper English to express ourselves and our complicated identities in an honored form. I hope people will read [the poems] and be able to relate, but I hope it also invites response, and that they will try to express themselves in that form.
And you can read “Echo Speaks” on The Hippo here.
Disobedient Futures – Call for Submissions
The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, mixed-genre work, plays, and screenplays on the topic of “Disobedient Futures” for our new speculative literature anthology. Writers are encouraged to imagine what the future cultures of America and the world might look like, and submit their work on the following topics:
Disobedient Women: How might women, feminists, and/or non-binary individuals disobey and reconfigure our understandings of power and femininity and masculinity in the future?
Disobedient Tribes: What if Americans found a way to subvert racial categories and challenge tribalism and cultures of fear? How might tribes disobey the rules of the game and create new types of community identities and cultural bridges?
Disobedient Class: Could Americans in the future overcome systems of class oppression and capitalist gluttony? How might individuals in the future subvert class hierarchies?
Disobedient Futures: Tell us what the future cultures of America and the world have in store. How might the emerging generations of today and tomorrow reconfigure today’s value systems, challenge today’s modes of violence, oppression, and power, and create new visions of society? Give us your best speculative writing which explores the possibilities and disruptions of disobedient futures.
Writers are welcome to submit utopian, dystopian, parallel history, futuristic, alternative reality, speculative essay, and even purely speculative fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and theatre. Optimistic and pessimistic tales of the future are welcome in equal measure, but gratuitous violence and discrimination are not. Poetry submissions should be 3-5 pages in length. Prose submissions can be 10-20 pages in length. Excerpts from longer works with synopses are welcome. Visual art related to these categories of Disobedient Futures is also welcome. Submit your retelling of the future today!
Submit your work at cww.submittable.com
Deadline: February 14, 2019
Rita Banerjee’s book “Echo in Four Beats” now available for order on Amazon.com!
Rita Banerjee’s new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats is now available for order on Amazon.com and also through the Finishing Line Press website. Echo in Four Beats will officially release on March 9, 2018 at the AWP 2018 Conference in Tampa, Florida. Here are some upcoming authors signings for Echo in Four Beats:
Rita Banerjee will be signing for CREDO and her new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats(Finishing Line Press, March 2018) at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Table (T403) from 1-2 pm on Friday, March 9, 2018. She will also be signing for Echo in Four Beats at the Finishing Line Press Table (T743) from 1-2 pm on Saturday, March 10, 2018.
And here is more information about the collection:
Combining elements, rhythms, and personas from American jazz, blues, and ragtime, poet Rita Banerjee presents a modern-day spin on the love story of Echo and Narcissus in her debut full-length poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats. But in this story, told in four parts, Echo is more than just a fragment, she is a Sapphic voice that speaks, foretells, forestalls, and repeats.
Praise for Echo in Four Beats:
“In our narcissism-addled times, Rita Banerjee awakens Echo out of mythical slumber and accords her center stage, with stirring results. These poems dance nimbly from the playful to the sacred, the pentatonic-ancient to the jazzy-contemporary, the observational to the contemplative, and cross languages and borders with abandon…offering a music both savory and profound.” — Tim Horvath, author of Understories and Circulation
“Echo in Four Beats uncover[s] what makes a word into a sensation, a sensation into a moment and what, in the swirling constellation of geographies, turns a moment into the sublime. Amidst the kinetic search for buried treasure in everyday encounters,…there are also unexpected collisions with silence so shocking, they stop us dead in our tracks. We realize the whiteness between words was here all along; its stillness curving the inside of this syncopated journey across time and space.”— Dipika Guha, playwright and author of Mechanics of Loveand The Rules, and screenwriter for American Gods
“From Ovid to Baudelaire, from Manhattan to Atlantis to the Ganges, these poems conjure shape-shifting and gyroscopic worlds where erasure is sustenance, myth is religion, and home is but a constant state of momentary arrivals. Banerjee’s attentive, precise, incantatory poems reverberate… with the “enchantments of art/ and life.’” — Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game and Skurtu, Romania
“Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a lyric wonder. Wildly intertextual and multilingual…the breadth of her work is staggering and yet utterly approachable, at once intimate and worldly. This may well be the first truly post-national book of poems I’ve ever read. I look forward to reading it again and again.” — Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and Carrier Wave
“[In] Banerjee’s polyglot collection–abounding with erasure, mistranslation and wit, [she] has crafted something astonishing.” — Stephen Aubrey, author of Daguerreotypeand What I Took in My Hand and Co-Artistic Director of The Assembly Theater, NYC
is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps(Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Born in California and raised in New Jersey, she teaches on modernism, art house film, and South Asian literary theory and aesthetics at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. She is the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest, and she is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays. Her work is represented by literary agent Natalie Kimber at The Rights Factory.
AWP 2018 Events feat. author Rita Banerjee
Author Rita Banerjee will be featured at a variety of book signings and readings at the AWP 2018 Conference in Tampa, Florida. Here is a quick guide of the events she will be featured in:

CREDO Editors Rita Banerjee & Diana Norma Szokolyai will be signing copies at the C&R Press Booth (Booth 1036) on Thursday, March 8 between 2-3pm! For more information see the C&R Press Author signing page here.
CREDO contributing authors will be signing copies at the CWW table, T403 near the left-most entrance, on March 9 between 2-4pm!

Rita Banerjee will be signing for CREDO and her new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018) at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Table (T403) from 1-2 pm on Friday, March 9, 2018. She will also be signing for Echo in Four Beats at the Finishing Line Press Table (T743) from 1-2 pm on Saturday, March 10, 2018.
The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to celebrate the pre-launch of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing at the Spontaneous Reading Party, at the AWP 2018 Conference in Tampa, Florida.
SPONTANEOUS READING PARTY presented by C&R Press, Women’s National Book Association and Cambridge Writers’ Workshop will take place on Friday, March 9 from 7-11 pm at the historic The Centre for Women Hyde Park Mansion. The party will featuring readings from C&R Press authors and CREDO Contributors, and will feature a full bar and food. The location for the party is less than one mile from the AWP Convention Center. To register for free tickets to the Spontaneous Reading Party, please register via Eventbrite here.
From the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, we’re proud to feature our CREDO contributing authors Rita Banerjee, Alexander Carrigan, Janine Harrison, Kevin McLellan, Nell Painter, Maya Sonenberg, Anca L. Szilágyi, and Diana Norma Szokolyai at the Spontaneous Reading Party!


