& Those Who Don’t Survive? at &NOW 2015 Blast Radius conference Fri, March 27!

Join Soham Patel, Carina Gia & me for a collaborative, improvised performance focused around this question: “can we migrate from our fates?” This takes place during &NOW 2015 Blast Radius conference @ CalArts (F200), this Friday, March 27, 2:30-3:45pm!

& Those Who Don’t Survive?

“The waste of ourselves: so much meat thrown at the feet of madness or fate or the state.” – Gloria Anzaldua

Can we migrate from our fates? As descendants of liminal communities, we practice diasporic poetics. Can such improvised, junked and scrapped histories be archived? Using these questions as prism and seed, our collaboration will be informed by our creative and scholarly pursuits. It will traverse multiple threads, such as transgenerational trauma, fragmented historical narratives as well as notions of exile, ghosts and monstrosity. We plan to amass, dismantle and disperse scraps of our (un)recorded histories in the cities (neighborhoods, seas, streets) we inhabit, and in the various cities and non-cities invoked as memories, monsters or ghosts. Additionally, we will consider relevant historical texts as well as other re-presentations of historical events, including absent, unwritten, overheard narratives and (ir)retrievable re-collections. Our project will be comprised of a multi-media installation and culminate in a collaborative performance. As a part of the &Now conference, we will choreograph part choral intervention, part carefully calibrated improvisation with a focus on collecting histories with whoever is in the room, (however temporarily) in exile from their lives. It is our intention to engage the audience in a structured improvisational score in order to create a communal text, illuminating refractions and investigating mutuality within the collaborative process.

Collaborators:

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart’s Traffic and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. A Kundiman, Lambda and Callaloo Fellow, they are part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities, and was a participant in Sharon Bridgforth’s Theatrical Jazz Institute. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Soul Mountain Retreat, Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony, and the Norman Mailer Center. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. In Milwaukee, they are cream city review’s editor-in-chief, senior editor of The Conversant, and serve on the board of Woodland Pattern.

Soham Patel is a Kundiman fellow. Two of her chapbooks, and nevermind the storm (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and Riva: A Chapter (kitchen-shy press) came out in 2013. Her work has been featured at Fact-Simile Editions, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly and various other places. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Carina Gia Farrero, writer and interdisciplinary performer, is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a co-founding member of the dance/theater company The Turnbuckles and the poetry-collective Poetry for the People, and a member of the performance-collective, Sister Spit. One of her plays was produced as part of Performing Arts Chicago, and her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Windy City Queer: LGBTQ Dispatches from the Third Coast, Arsenic Lobster, The Encyclopedia Project and elsewhere. In 2008, two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. When she’s not writing, she’s collecting strays from the side of the road.

This takes place during &NOW 2015 Blast Radius conference @ CalArts. More info about the conference here:

http://andnow2015.com/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1555872574697670/

Thinking Its Presence: The Racial Imaginary: Race & Creative Writing — Baraka poems//Poetics of Anguish, Gender & Variant Constructions//Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Dismantle reading

Grateful to be able to come this year to Missoula, Montana for THINKING ITS PRESENCE: THE RACIAL IMAGINARY, A CONFERENCE ON RACE, CREATIVE WRITING & LITERARY STUDY: http://cas.umt.edu/tip/raceandcreativewriting/

Now in its second year, Thinking Its Presence: Race, Literary Study, and Creative Writing examines innovative creative writing and scholarship that re-thinks the complex and inseparable links between literary forms and the racialized thinking, processes, and histories that have shaped this country since its founding. The conference brings together the discipline and teaching of creative writing with perspectives from critical race theory, poetics, performance studies, literary theory, literary history, ethnic literatures, and Native American and Indigenous studies. We intend to foster a dynamic exchange among creative writers and scholars. To that end, the conference will include readings, panels devoted to scholarship, and panels devoted to critical discussion of pedagogies and institutional practices.

The title of this conference comes from scholar Dorothy Wang’s book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013). Wang’s book makes the larger case “that aesthetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts when it comes to the writing and reception of poetry.”

I’ll be participating in three events at the conference:

1) Amiri Baraka: Responding to an SOS: A Conversation with Paul Vangelisti (Friday, March 13, 3:45pm – 5:00pm, UC 333)

I’ll be reading some Baraka poems with Ed Pavlic & Metta Sama during a conversation with Randall Horton & Paul Vangelisti

2) On the Poetics of Anguish, Gender, and Variant Constructions (Saturday, March 14, 11-12:50pm, UC Theatre)

Soham Patel, Ching-In Chen, Bhanu Jacasta Kapil & MG Roberts

Can violence, the bifurcation/trifurcation of gender, and the line speak to impossibilities of saying and arrival? Is monstrosity’s fluidity and multiplicity contained in a poetry’s body? Do the pathways of grammar, our variant/queer/violent/diasporic sentences/lines/sounds–reflect the risks and failures of our experiments? In this conversation, Ching-In Chen, Bhanu Kapil, Soham Patel and Mg Roberts investigate gender and its constant relation to a non-resolution and to anguish by exploring the self’s push against structures of possibility, grammar, and the body itself.

3) Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Reading (Saturday, March 14, 3:45-5pm, UC Theatre)

Rae Paris, Ching-In Chen, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela & Kenji Liu

The VONA/Voices Writing Workshop, founded by Elmaz Abinader, Junot Díaz, Victor Díaz, and Diem Jones in 1999, is the only workshop in the U.S. dedicated to the aesthetics of writers of color. In 2014, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela of Thread Makes Blanket Press published Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. Dismantle brings together voices of writers of color from VONA
workshops across the years, alumni and faculty. Join us as we read writing from the anthology, and as we talk about the important role of Thread Makes Blanket Press in publishing.

The first ever VONA/Voices anthology, Dismantle, includes creative work from established and new authors who have either taught at VONA, or are alumni of the program. In spring 2014 the New York Times re-published a version of Junot Díaz’s introduction in Dismantle in which he discusses his experience in his predominantly White MFA program. While many of us have been having conversations about the overwhelming Whiteness of MFA programs (faculty, students, curriculum), Díaz’s essay encouraged a larger conversation about the overall lack of racial and ethnic diversity in
these programs. Dismantle’s importance in bringing together the voices of writers of color, and in highlighting the work of VONA/Voices of Our Nation and Thread Makes Blanket Press cannot be underestimated.

SF this weekend: From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant Garde

Excited to be in the Bay area this weekend to participate in the From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant Garde symposium

Thursday, August 21. Pre-Symposium Reading and Dancing 
6:30 PM – 9 PM  @ Cat Club SF – 1190 Folsom St., San Francisco CA
MFA Mixer August 2014 presents: From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant Garde

The MFA Mixer is a monthly reading event that brings together current MA/MFA/PhD students (and a few recent or semi-recent graduates) from all over the SF Bay Area to read from their work.

Each reader has up to 6 MINUTES to read!

Admission is free.

The Cat Club
1190 Folsom St.
SF

$2.00 well drinks from 9-10 pm.

’80s dance party begins at 9 pm!

Our August readers:

1st half:
Chris Pine
Jason Bayani
Ahmunet Jordon
François Luong
Margaret Rhee

2nd half:
Jayinee Basu
Truong Tran
Robert Ricardo Reese
Natalia Duong
Ching-In Chen

Doors open at 6:30 pm. Reading begins at 7 pm!

*

 From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian American Avant Garde symposium Friday-Sunday will take place at CIIS MFA Programs

1453 Mission St, San Francisco, California 94103

This four-day symposium hosted by the MFA Program at California Institute of Integral Studies, (CIIS) brings internationally recognized writers, scholars and students of the Asian Avant- Garde together in an artistic and experimental setting. In keeping with the university’s mission of forging understanding between East and West, participants will recover, examine, and place in historical context themes of miscegenation, aggression, and privilege within this global diaspora. We will explore the mental and aesthetic health of this community, from its beginnings in individual writers to its articulation as a movement, albeit one whose artistic integrity remains loosely defined and misunderstood by the much larger experimental poetic community.

Each day of the symposium is thematically focused, offering participants and attendees rich opportunities for engagement and investigation of the multi-layered themes. The format—bridging literary presentation, facilitated breakout sessions, and the participatory production of creative work—will foster the development of a community that will carry this discussion forward well beyond the event itself.

The goals of the symposium at the outset are many; others will emerge collectively through the conversations and investigations held together. As the conference title suggests, we start with trauma, recognizing the dimensions of the Asian Avant-Garde that are miscegenated, aggressive, schizophrenic, and resulting from privilege. After the 3-day journey together we move towards catharsis; we will discover ways for the subject of the Asian Avant-Garde to move onward and away from aggression and trauma, to write for and from healing. 

Featuring:
Bhanu Kapil
D’Lo (D’Loco Kid)
Pireeni Sundaralingam
Ronaldo Wilson
Truong Tran
Mg Roberts
Ching-In Chen
Cheena Marie Lo
Geneva Chao
Soham Patel
Jai Arun Ravine
Margaret Rhee
Monica Mody
Jason Magabo Perez
Sean Labrador y Manzano

Free and Open to the Public.
More info: mfa@ciis.edu

Friday, August 22.
6 PM – 7:15 PM
Interrogation: Dis/Orientation and Re/Orientation-What is the Avant Garde for?
Presenters: Bhanu Kapil, Geneva Chao, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Truong Tran, MG Roberts, Sean Labrador y Manzano

7:30 PM – 9 PM
Performances by MG Roberts, Jason Magabo Perez, Monica Mody, Laurie Buenafe Krsmanovic, and Coke Tani

Followed by Open Mic

Saturday, August 23. 
10 AM – 12PM
(1) Writing and Performance Workshop: Step Through The Indigo Door That Has Opened In the Air Above You
with Bhanu Kapil
(2) Performance Workshop: D’FaQTo Life
with D’Lo

12 PM – 1PM
Lunch Break

1 PM -230 PM
Interrogating Queerness: The Poetics of Both and Neither
with Cheena Marie Lo, Soham Patel, MG Roberts, Ching-In Chen

230PM – 330PM
AVATAR | DIASPORA
with Ronaldo V. Wilson

330PM – 430PM
Creative Incubation

430PM – 6PM
(1) Mixed Race, Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre: Disfluency and Illegibility in Identity and Art Making
with Jai Arun Ravine

(2) Poetics of Dis/Appearance: Historicity and Resistance in the Asian Avant Garde
with Geneva Chao

6 PM – 7PM
Reception

7 PM – 9 PM
Performances by Bhanu Kapil and D’Lo

Sunday, August 24.
Performing the Avant-Garde: Poetry Beyond the Written Word

10 AM – 1PM
(1) The Passion of El Hulk Hogancito
with Jason Magabo Perez

(2) Beauty of the Resisting Body, or Interrogating the Other
with Sean Labrador y Manzano 

(3) Trauma of the Avant-Garde & Intercession of the Waters: A Future Possible
with Monica Mody 

(4) Kimchi Poetry Machine
with Margaret Rhee

Truong Tran as facilitator

1 PM – 2 PM
Lunch Break

2 PM – 3 PM
Incubating Catharsis with Pireeni Sundaralingam and Carolyn Cooke – Deconstructing the Asian Avant Garde

3 PM – 7 PM
Performances by Conference Participants

7PM – DAWN of a New Day
hmmmmm

Woman Made Gallery Poetry, midwest (milwaukee) monster remix, Burden of Light: Poems on Illness & Loss & Near Kin: A Collection of Words & Art inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler

Dear lovelies,

I’m happier for the warmer weather! There’s a buzz of springtime activity in the air and lots happening:

1) Woman Made Gallery Poetry: Rosellen Brown, Barbara Barg, Ching-In Chen, Kristy Bowen

Sunday, April 6, 2014, 1:30-3:30pm

Woman Made Gallery – 685 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60642

curated by Nina Corwin

17th annual International Open exhibit spans both Women’s History month and Poetry Month. While most WMG readings are organized around the theme of the concurrent art exhibit, this reading is an open celebration of women writers.

Participating readers include:

Rosellen Brown: author of ten books, five of them novels, The Autobiography of My Mother, Tender Mercies – not the movie! – Civil Wars, Before and After – of which there was a movie –and Half a Heart. Her three books of poetry include Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, and she has published a miscellany of essays, poetry and stories, and a book of stories, Street Games. Her work has appeared frequently in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories and Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Barbara Barg, an old white woman, cocktail waitress, typesetter, private investigator, document designer, house cleaner, help-desk specialist, software trainer, procrastinator, energy healer, drug addict, baby sitter, moving van driver, fiction writer, tour guide, singer, songwriter, neuro-tech enthusiast, drummer, personal organizer, pixie-dust sprinkler, dog walker, advice-giver, census taker, editor, political activist, web content writer, energy clearer, cigarette smoker, mentor, tuning forker, marketing assistant, meditation practitioner, encyclopedia salesperson, student of aquaponics, shoulder to cry on, qigong foot masseuse, film script writer, day dreamer, ice-cream truck driver, carnival worker, and poet. She currently teaches rhythm/tone/texture strategies for poets online for Chicago School of Poetics.

Writer and visual artist Kristy Bowen, author of several book, chapbook, and art zine projects, including the recent girl show (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) and the shared properties of water and stars (Noctuary Press, 2013). She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio, which publishes a series of chapbooks devoted to women authors. Her fifth collection, major characters in minor films, is forthcoming next year from Sundress Publications.

and Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow and a member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Macondo writing communities. A community organizer,they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston. In Milwaukee, they are cream city review‘s editor-in-chief.

 

2) midwest (milwaukee) monster remix in Verse Wisconsin!

Thanks to Verse Wisconsin‘s editors Wendy Vardaman & Sarah Busse for giving me the opportunity to curate a section for the Midwest Remix issue! Check out the work of Carina Gia Farrero, Soham Patel, Chelsea Wait, Dawn Tefft, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Cassie Nicholson, Freesia McKee & Jessica Vega Gonzalez in “midwest (milwaukee) monster remix”! Lots of other great work curated by Lane Hall, Nick Demske, Margaret Rozga, Dasha Kelly, Chelsea Tadeyeske, Oscar Mireles & Kara Candito/Adam Fell!

 

3) “Exponential Mothers” in The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss

Thanks to Tanya Chernov for organizing the e-book anthology, The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, with poems meant to provide companionship in difficult times.

Along with my poem, Exponential Mothers,” you can find 90 other poets including Jessica Jacobs, Michelle Brown, Peggy Shumaker, Susan Firer & many more, alongside audio, video, paintings, photo, digital art, links to books & litmags. You set your own price, and all proceeds go to cancer research.

4) “Parable of the Shiny City” in Near Kin: A Collection of Words & Arts inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler

Just received my contributor’s e-book copy of Near Kin: A Collection of Words & Art inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, edited by Marie Lecrivain, from Sybaritic Press. Pleased that my poem, “Parable of the Shiny City,” has found a home alongside the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Walidah Imarisha, Tara Betts, Danez Smith & many others!