AQ Writers Wrap, Pack, Launch, and Read at the ABC This Winter
AQ Writers Wrap, Pack, Launch, and Read at the ABC This Winter
[AMSTERDAM] January and February were busy months for Amsterdam Quarterly (AQ) and its Writers’ Group. On Friday, 31 January, an enthusiastic audience gathered in the American Book Center’s second-floor White Room to celebrate the launch of AQ’s fourteenth annual yearbook. The book includes work in nine genres by 52 authors and/or artists, from 11 countries on five continents.
Nimruz De Castro, Caroline Cronjäger, Darya Danesh, Hollis Kurman, Monique van Maare, Bryan R. Monte, Pat Seman, Marcus Slingsby, and Angela Williams read their published and/or new work. At the interval, María Minaya demonstrated the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which has printed all fourteen issues of the AQ yearbook.
Bryan R. Monte, publisher/editor, Amsterdam Quarterly, 14th Annual Yearbook Launch Party/Reading, 31 January 2025. (Photo: Hollis Kurman)
Hollis Kurman, AQ 14th Annual Yearbook Launch Party/Reading, 31 January 2025. L. to right clockwise: Angela Williams, Monique van Maare, Bryan R. Monte, Hollis Kurman, Darya Danesh, and Luke Nyman. (Photo: Tracy Metz)
The AQ yearbooks are unique, literary items given only to its issues’ contributing writers and artists, AQ Writers’ Group members, and occasionally to audiences, (one copy per household in order to be environmentally friendly), since all the printed yearbook’s work appears also on the magazine’s two websites at www.amsterdamquarterly.org and amsterdamquarterly.nl
In preparation for this book launch, the AQ Writers’ Group met on Sunday, 19 January to wrap and pack the Amsterdam Quarterly 2024 Yearbooks so they could be posted to non-US contributors. Wrappers and packers included Simon Brod, Cronjäger, Danesh, De Castro, Kurman, Van Maare, and Seman. ‘They accomplished in 26 minutes what would have taken me two days,’ AQ editor, Monte said. Afterwards, everyone was treated to coffee or tea and cake or pie in the ABC’s first floor Harrar Cafe.
Nimruz de Castro and Monique van Maare wrap & pack the AQ 2024 Yearbooks. (Photo: Bryan R. Monte)
L. to r. Caroline Cronjäger, Simon Brod, and Pat Seman at the Harrar Café, (Photo: Bryan R. Monte)
February 2025 also included readings by AQ Writers. On Wednesday, 19 February, the ABC hosted The Ivy Circle reading night which featured AQ Writers Rebecca Heath Anderson (forthcoming in AQ42), Kurman, and Monte. The Ivy Circle is an active community of alumni clubs from approximately 20 leading North American universities and B-schools. It organizes events on a wide range of topics, hosts several annual education fairs, and finances Fulbright scholarships for graduate and undergraduate study in the US.
Hollis Kurman, Ivy Circle Reading, ABC, February 2025. (Photo: Jitse, ABC staff)
Bryan R. Monte, Ivy Circle Reading, ABC, February 2025. (Photo: Jitse, ABC staff)
On Wednesday, 26 February, the ABC hosted a Winter Writers’ Night providing writers, editors, agents, and publishers a chance to meet, mingle, and make connections over drinks and nibbles. Speakers included David Beckett, Hannah Huber, Coleen Getski, and Monte, among others. Monte read a poem entitled ‘White Room’, from his book On the Level: Poems on Living with Multiple Sclerosisas a tribute to the liberating feeling the EBM’s revolutionary print-on-demand (POD) publishing method and its skilled, artisan printer, Minaya, create:
People come here to browse or watch / as books are printed and bound upon request (that) …
lift / the veil on our origins and final destinations…
Bright sunlight pours in through tall, many-paned windows. AQ