Though there’s a lot more summer left to devour, we’re excited to announce the kickoff of First Person Plural Harlem’s third season!   We welcome journalist and novelist Siddhartha Deb, fiction writer Danielle Evans, and biographer and critic Elizabeth Kendall; we’re also very thrilled to have dancer and choreographer Ashley Byler return with new work.  The event will start with a groovy set by our resident DJ Lady DM at 6:30 pm, followed by the reading 7pm, and a closing set by Lady DM.

Born in northeastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels, The Point of Return, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the Republic, a book of the year in the Daily Telegraph. He is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and the Nation Institute and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His latest book, a work of narrative nonfiction, The Beautiful and the Damned, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK and the winner of the PEN Open award in the United States. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harpers, the Guardian, the Observer, The New York Times, Bookforum, the Daily Telegraph, the Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which was a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection for 2011, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction and the 2011 Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and an honorable mention for the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award.  It was named one of the best books of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews and O Magazine, and longlisted for The Story Prize.  Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2010, and in New Stories from the South. She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, was the 2006-2007 Carol Houck Smith fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and now teaches literature and creative writing at American University in Washington DC.

Elizabeth Kendall is a dance and culture critic and a professor at New York’s New School (Eugene Lang College and Liberal Studies graduate faculty).  Her book Balanchine and the Lost Muse:  Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, was published in July, 2013, by Oxford U. Press.  She has also written Where She Danced, The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the l930s and two memoirs, American Daughter and Autobiography of a Wardrobe.  She grew up in St. Louis.

Ashley Byler was born in Rocket City, U.S.A. She received a BA in Music and Psychology from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been seen as part of Dance Theatre Workshop’s Studio Series, The Field’s Uptown/Downtown, Movement Research at the Judson Church and as commissioned by Ketchikan Theatre Ballet. She is an arts educator at The Eliza Frost School and dances with Sara Rudner. Her recent concerns as an artist hover around reclaiming the term pedestrian from the post-modern dance tradition, redefining it through popular social dance movement and applying rigorous compositional techniques associated with some heroes of the Judson Church in the 1960’s.

DJ Lady DM describes herself as a “musical expat,” an apt description for her fearless take on crossing genres of dance-able music, and is probably one of the only DJs in NYC who can claim having spun a party at the Hell’s Angels in the E. Village. With roots stemming from the legendary musical island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, Lady DM’s story begins in 1995, in NYC as a student radio host on FIT’s station, by day; and avid regular at parties like Theo Parrish’s SugarBabies by night. Two years later, she begins her ascent of the city’s DJ circuit proper, as part of an all-female DJ lineup at the Limelight. By late 99’-10’, while based in Berlin, Lady DM regularly hosted radio shows in Zurich, and Berlin, while jetting around Europe entertaining crowds at legendary parties at Amsterdam’s Mazzo Club, Zurich’s Lethargy, and Berlin’s WMF. In Berlin, Lady DM also curated events, with Berlin’s then up-and-coming artists, such as Peaches, Dixon, Jamie Lidell, & Gonzales, to name a few. http://djladydm.tumblr.com/

We’ll see you there!