Karen Schoemer To Release New Album “August” On November 7th Via Dromedary Records; Stream New Single “August 30”

Poet Karen Schoemer is excited to announce her new album August out November 7 on Dromedary Records (pre-order). The album features musical collaborations with Mike Watt, Amy Rigby, Steve Almaas, Zak Boerger, Eric Hardiman, Parashi, Wednesday Knudsen, Madeline Darby & Body Memory and more. 

Today she shares the album’s lead track “August 30,” featuring Oli Heffernan (her bandmate in Detective Instinct). The song is now streaming on Bandcamp.

August is partly an homage to poet Bernadette Mayer, known for her experimental approach to language. In 1971, Mayer took a photograph every day for a month and documented her experiences in careful notes, which became her groundbreaking work Memory. Inspired by this, Karen Schoemer created August as “a month of August” in poems, 31 collage-style pieces drawn from raw material she wrote in August 2022. She later shaped and reassembled them during weekends at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, MA, the house where Moby-Dick was written. Vocals were recorded at home in the winter of 2024–25, with Sky Furrows bassist Eric Hardiman co-producing, mixing, and mastering the album.

Schoemer records and performs with several bands, including Sky Furrows, Jaded Azurites, Ivan the Tolerable, Day for Nights, and Karen & Peter. A former music journalist, she came to poetry and performance in midlife, bringing decades of immersion in music. Her first collaboration was with Oli Heffernan and Mike Watt in Detective Instinct, contributing words and vocals to the 7” EPs Schoemer Songs and Falling in Lilacs (2013). Sky Furrows has released two albums, Sky Furrows (2020, Tape Drift/Skell/Philthy Rex) and Reflect and Oppose (2023, Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube), and has shared stages with Oneida, Garcia Peoples, Savak, and Sweeping Promises. Jaded Azurites, her bass/voice duo with Watt, has released seven digital EPs since 2018. Day for Nights (Sparrows & Wires), was a collaboration with Chicago guitarist Zak Boerger, who passed away from cancer in June 2025.

Beyond music, Schoemer has a wide-ranging literary career. She published Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ‘50s Pop Music (Free Press) in 2006, and from the early 2010s hosted The Schoemer Show on WGXC 90.7 FM in New York’s Hudson Valley. She earned her MFA in creative writing from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn in 2019. In 2015–2016, she studied with Mayer at summer workshops, deepening her connection to experimental forms of poetry.