Yowzah!!! A brand-new book trailer on YouTube!

Hello all:

Yep. You're looking at the cover of my latest book ROAD WORK AHEAD, which comes out on March 1st, 2011! I'm very, very excited about this book, and thrilled that everyone can now view my book trailer on YouTube. (Although I "speak" in ASL, it's subtitled in English with a beautiful classical guitar duet composed by Shanan Estreicher!)

More exciting news to come.

Have a great February, all!

Raymond

P.S. You can preorder your copy here. (Free shipping on domestic orders, and they ship on February 26th.) Thanks again!

Gotta shout this out loud! MUTE is on YouTube ...

Hello:

I've been very busy with a lot of projects these days, but at least I was able to finish one in particular: My book MUTE has a new trailer in which I talk about why I wrote it. :) You can check it out on YouTube. It's all subtitled in English for the signing-impaired, of course.

Have lots of exciting news in store, but I will share it as soon as details are confirmed!

Have a great week, all!

Raymond

What? An interview with moi as a Deaf poet?

Hello ...

This is an excerpt from a long interview I've done with Wordgathering, a fantastic online journal focusing on disability and literature. (I hope I haven't babbled too much!)

Wordgathering: Raymond, you are such a Renaissance person – a poet, playwright, translator, film maker, novelist and essayist – that it is hard to know exactly just where to begin, but one thing that I find particularly interesting is your work in translating the work of Clayton Valli [an ASL poet] and making it accessible to the non-ASL public. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like?

RL [Raymond Luczak]: When I first saw Clayton, I was an 18-year-old student in the New Signers Program (NSP) which I took for three weeks at Gallaudet University prior to becoming a freshman there. By this point I had been writing uninformed (and uniformly) bad poetry for seven years. I had never questioned the unspoken assumption that poetry was the domain of hearing people until our ASL teacher informed us that an ASL poet was coming to our class that afternoon. "ASL poet"? I knew ASL, and I knew poetry (or so I'd thought at the time), but together? How would that work?

Wanna read more? The rest of this interview is at this link.

They also have a very thoughtful review of my memoir Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life at this link.

Please check it out, and let me know what you think! Have a great week, all!

Raymond

I shouldn't shout ... but MUTE is coming out!

Hello, everyone!

While I've been busy rewriting my new play The Darkest Room in the House for Bridge Productions these days for its performance in March 2010, I got word that my newest book of poems, Mute, will be shipping within two weeks. (OMG.)


Here's what A Midsummer Night's Press had to say about my book:

"Do not be afraid of your face.
Move into a beam of light
in the bar. Smile openly.
Watch his hands move
quicker than strobe lights
as he surveys the crowd with his friends.
Do not think of how hard
it might be to have a casual
conversation.

-- From “How to Fall for a Deaf Man”

Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in the hands of Raymond Luczak, who demonstrates in his third collection what it’s like to navigate between the warring languages of confusion and clarity.

As a deaf gay man in the hearing world, he lends an unforgettable voice to his reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound."

Kinda flattering, no? I have absolutely no idea who those two sexy guys on the cover are, but I like how they seem to be listening for each other's silence. Heck, you can "listen" to my new poems by preordering a copy of Mute at this link. (Yep, shipping is FREE within the U.S.!)

If you want the book's ISBN number for ordering through your favorite bookstore, please copy the product information from here. You can also preorder the book from Amazon, but it won't likely ship as quickly.

In a week or so, I will post a few samples and a trailer for the book on YouTube and elsewhere online. I've also consolidated all my book trailers into one place on YouTube. Check them all out!

Thanks again for your continued support. May your toes stay warm and toasty!

Hugs,

Raymond