First Mondays: Readings of New Works in Progress
One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.
Schedule:
6:30pm
Geo Wyeth makes music and performance in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is black-like-Mariah, trans transmission scrambled egg head, originally from the 212.
Tracie Morris is a sound poet and author from Brooklyn, New York.
6:30pm
Jeanne Thornton is the author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald, both Lambda Literary Award finalists, as well as the co-publisher of Instar Books.
Nahshon Anderson‘s debut book, SHOOTING RANGE, a gritty and gut wrenching memoir of Black trans life in Hollywood, is almost ready for the world.
Torrey Peters, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of the cult novellas The Masker, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, and Glamour Boutique.
6:30pm
Matt Brim is the author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (2014), and he teaches at the College of Staten Island where he is finishing a book titled Poor Queer Studies.
John Keene is the author of Counternarratives (New Directions) and other books, teaches at Rutgers University-Newark, and lives in New Jersey.
6:30pm
Nancy Kricorian is the author of three novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, and is currently at work on her fourth, which is set in an Armenian neighborhood in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.
Nuar Alsadir, a poet, essayist and psychoanalyst, is the author of Fourth Person Singular (2017) and More Shadow Than Bird (2012).
Bina Sharif is a playwright, director, actress and a visual artist.
Susan Abulhawa is an author, activist and founder of Playgrounds for Palestine. Abulhawa is the author of The Blue Between Sky and Water and Mornings in Jenin.
6:30pm
Raquel Gutiérrez is a writer of personal essays, memoir, art criticism, and poetry and is a 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital.
Ru (Nina) Puro is the author of Each Tree Could Hold A Noose Or A House, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Deming Fund, & others.
Camille Roy’s last book is Sherwood Forest (Futurepoem) and her next is a book of selected prose, forthcoming from Nightboat.
Gail Scott is the author of the novels The Obituary (Coach House/Nightboat), My Paris (Dalkey Archive), and the forthcoming Furniture Music, in part an ode to the downtown Manhattan poetry scene.
Pamela Sneed, New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works the chaplet, Gift (Belladonna*) and the prose collection Sweet Dreams (Belladonna* 2018).
1:00pm
Co-organized by Ken Chen and Sarah Schulman.
In honor of Avant Garde Women Writers who we have lost, continuing in last year’s tradition begun with Kathy Acker, we offer a collective marathon reading of Dictee by THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA. Born in South Korea, an immigrant at age 12, Theresa emerged as a San Francisco artist and moved to NY where she was preparing a show at Artists Space while working at the design department of the Met. She created highly inventive and innovative interdisciplinary visual and textual work using four languages and a number of mythological traditions. At age 31 in 1982, she was murdered and Dictee was published to become a classic Avant-garde art text widely taught and highly inspiring.
Special Guests
John Cha (Theresa’s Brother)
Yong Soon Min (artist)
Lawrence Rinder (director, Berkeley Art Museum)
Ken Chen (director, Asian American Writers’ Workshop)
Berenice Reynaud (scholar, curator, critic, teacher)
Readers
Nuar Alsadir, Lee Ann Brown, Alexander Chee, Ava Chin, Monika Gagnon, Erica Cho, Patricia Spears Jones, Mia Kang, Myung Mi Kim, Catherine Lord, Stefanie Mar, Tracie Morris, Carlos Motta, Meena Nanji, Bina Sharif, Aldrin Valdez, Cecilia Vicuna, Sarah Wang, John Yau, Monica Youn and more.
6:30pm
NEW POETS OF NATIVE NATIONS – New Works In Progress
Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) is the author of five collections of poetry and NEW POETS OF NATIVE NATIONS from Graywolf Press.
Layli Long Soldier (Lakota) is author of WHEREAS (Graywolf Press) which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN / Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn, NY composer, musician and artist.
Gwen Westerman (Dakota and Cherokee) is the author of the poetry collection FOLLOW THE BLACKBIRDS and is a fiber artist, historian, and professor of Humanities at Minnesota State University Mankato.