On Monday, March 5 Margo Jefferson, Sam Lipsyte and Mendi Obadike read to a full house. Thanks to our readers for their inspired work and to our audience for their generous attention. Highlights of the evening included hearing excerpts from Margo Jefferson’s new book-in-progress; listening to Sam Lipsyte read a story he had never before shared with an audience; and getting quizzed by Mendi Obadike on topics related to the previous readers and the rest of the world. We enjoyed meeting so many of you who took the time to check us out. Our next event is scheduled for 4/23 at Shrine @ 7pm. Please plan to join us for what will be another one-of-a-kind evening. And tell your friends!
Author Archives: admin
FPP Harlem in the Huffington Post
Glenn Ligon, Give Us A Poem (Palindrome #2), 2007
Check out what FPP Harlem co-founder Stacy Parker LeMelle’s has to say about us in the Huffington Post:
“Me. We.” There it is in the Studio Museum atrium, the Muhammad Ali poem on demand as conceived by Glenn Ligon, his Me on top of We. This is Glenn Ligon, so this is also a light show. First, the Me is lit. Then the We. Then the Me. The We. Tick tock, back forth. The extinguishing of one while the other shines brightly. The moment when neither is lit at all.
Read the rest of her piece here.
Margo Jefferson Riffs on FPP in Untapped New York!
Check out this great profile by Laura Itzkowitz on Margo Jefferson and the First Person Plural Reading Series in Untapped New York!
Thanks to Untapped New York for keeping their coverage local and always—cool.
Margo Jefferson Interviewed on The Aviary Online
Check out this great interview of Margo Jefferson by FPP Harlem co-founder Amy Benson in the February 2012 issue of The Aviary Online.
In the interview, Jefferson says:
If you love something aren’t you always conned by it? We claim not to believe the word “objective” anymore, we want to believe we can master it somehow. And yet we have to have some element of belief. Belief is surrender, it’s yielding up your capacities even to necessarily be on equal terms with something.
Read the rest of the interview here.
FPP Harlem Partners with Hue Man Bookstore and Cafe
We are so excited to announce that we are partnering with local independent bookseller Hue Man Bookstore and Cafe to make copies of our featured authors’ books available for purchase during our March 5 event at Shrine World Music Venue.
Hue Man’s mission is “to inspire, motivate and educate.” Every month they host a wide variety of authors, so check our their calendar of events. Or visit the store in person at 2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd (Between 124th and 125th Streets)!
Follow Us!
Keep up-to-date with news about FPPHarlem writers and other literary and cultural events by following us on Twitter or on Facebook!
There are just a few weeks to go until our first event, but we have been keeping busy checking out The Bearden Project at The Studio Museum and exhibitions on the Obama Presidency and Malcolm X at the Schomburg Library.
Here “We” Come!
The First Person Plural Reading Series is making progress on getting the word out about our first event thanks to Natalie Molina and her wonderful designs for our posters and logo! Posters and postcards are being printed, and we are getting ready to post around the neighborhood and points downtown.
We are also creating a Facebook page and a few other ways for you to stay up-to-date with all that is going on with First Person Plural.
Look for us on a bulletin board near you!
Opening Event: March 5, 2012 @ 7pm
Reply
Harlem, NEW YORK—The FPP Harlem Collective hosts the opening reading in the First Person Plural Reading Series at the Shrine World Music Venue, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, novelist Sam Lipsyte, and cross-genre artists Mendi+Keith Obadike. The writers will read work written especially for the series, stories told from the “first person plural” or the “we” point-of-view. They will also read from other recent work. Admission is free.
Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton), Best African American Essays, 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of The Ask, Venus Drive, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book of 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, N+1, McSweeney’s, Tin House, NOON, The Quarterly, Esquire, GQ and Playboy, among other places. He is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.
Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art, and literature. Their work has been commissioned The NY African Film Festival / Electronic Arts Intermix, Northwestern University, Bucknell University, The Kitchen, The Yale Cabaret, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Rhizome / The New Museum, and The Whitney Museum of Art. They have released two albums on Bridge Records, a book of poetry with Lotus Press, and two forthcoming artist books on 1913 Press. They are currently working on a new series of sound installations and touring their opera-masquerade Four Electric Ghosts. www.blacknetart.com
For more information, contact: fppharlem [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com
Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
March 5, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/