Category Archives: Events

Announcing Our October 15 Lineup in Partnership with Belladonna Collaborative

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We at First Person Plural are thrilled to announce that our second reading this season is in partnership with Belladonna Collaborative and features three stellar poets: r. erica doyle, Tonya Foster, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.  The Belladonna* mission is to “promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable and dangerous with language.” This is a mission we wholeheartedly support!  Join us at 7:00pm on Tuesday, October 15 at Shrine in Harlem.  As always, admission is free.

ericar. erica doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and her first book, proxy, was published by Belladonna Books in 2013. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Ploughshares, Bloom, Blithe House Quarterly and Sinister Wisdom.

She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Erica is a Cave Canem Fellow and received her MFA in Poetry from The New School. She lives in New York City, where she is an administrator in the NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire: A Free Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

Tonya-portraitTonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals. Tonya has worked as a teacher at City College’s Bridge to Medicine Program, the Saturday/Outreach Program at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Middle School Program at Wadleigh Middle School.

The author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (forthcoming from Belladonna Press/Futurepoem Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002), her research interests include 19th and 20th century poetries of the Americas; 20th century poetics; the poetics and politics of space; African diaspora fiction; and Afro-futurism; and dystopias.

Tea Time by TateLaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a writer, vocalist and the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Her poetry has been published in Ploughshares, Jubilat, Fence, Rattapallax, Nocturnes, and LA Review. She has received awards from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, Harlem Community Arts Fund, Jerome Foundation, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is a native of Harlem.

 

Spellbound at AWP 2013

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AWP is a massive writers’ conference that is held annually in an urban convention center.  Official readings and panels take place in sterile, look-alike rooms, with florescent lights above rows of stackable seats.  As we anticipated our reading at AWP 2013 in Boston, the desire was blare our music, spraypaint the walls, do something, anything, to strangify our rectangle of space.

However, there is something to the sameness of each conference room: the environments are equalized.  It is up to each reader to do the transporting, the transforming–each reader must bring her own magic, and it must come from her pages, from her voice.

And at our AWP reading, we were spellbound.

We had a kickass lineup, and that’s the truth. First, bam, Margo Jefferson–who made her way from NYC in a snowstorm to be with us–she took us into the “we” of her youth when she read Twain and Baldwin as not just a young scholar, but as a young girl of the Negro elite.  She shared the resultant epiphanies, kept us rapt by her mind’s journeying.

Keya Mitra followed, beguiling us with the story of Anita and her two wombs, each the home of a baby created by another man: one, who is her Indian-American husband; the other, her great Anglo Austin lover.  We laughed, we grimaced, we laughed some more.  She finished and we knew why she had been declared a best new American voice.

And then our last reader was Justin Torres. For those of us who have read We the Animals, there was no reason to expect, or wish, that his reading of the work would add anything more to his stunning novel.  Wrong.  His voice was hypnotic, full of desire, elegy, and light. If Torres would have dropped to a bare whisper we would have fallen out of our chairs trying to listen.  Before starting, he said he had stopped reading that opening chapter, that he felt it all read-out, but decided that on this occasion to share. We hate to break it to him, but his declaration may be like the Stones declaring they were dropping “Satisfaction” from the set list…  nice try, but no one is going to let him get with that. Classic work resists retirement. away

All we know is that by reading’s end, we were all very satisfied.

The FPP Interview: Margo Jefferson

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Renowned critic and nonfiction writer Margo Jefferson will take the FPP Harlem stage at AWP in Boston this Friday, March 8, 2013 with Justin Torres and Keya Mitra.  We talk to her about her about separating the personal from “bigger things” and pursuing another kind of authority.  Come hear her @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level. F229.

What emotional concerns are you pursuing in your current project?  What emotional concerns appear to be pursuing you?  How does a self worth selfdom emerge from family, history, biology? What were, what are its needs, its demands its punishments and rewards? How do selves get revised & remapped?

How have you navigated the challenge of writing a personal history that reveals your own misperceptions about access to privilege?  Make that present tense, i.e. still navigating.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

Announcing Our Lineup for April 1st at Shrine, Harlem!

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Our last event of the season will be a big one!  Poet Jericho Brown, multi-disciplinary art duo eteam, poet and artist Khadijah Queen, and fiction writer Rachel Sherman will take the FPP stage at 7pm.  The phenomenal DJ LadyDM will be spinning from 6:30-7:00 and again from 8:30-9:00. We can’t wait to see what they have in store!

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans and is a recent recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  Brown is now an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, The New Yorker, Oxford American, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry.  His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award.

Since 2001 eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) traffic in transience. At the intersection of relational aesthetics, the Internet and land art, eteam coordinates collective happenings and conceptual transactions between the earthly plane and the realms of the interweb, often reconstructed in hypnotic video work, radio plays, or more recently novellas. Their projects have been featured at PS1 NY, MUMOK Vienna, Centre Pompidou Paris, Transmediale Berlin, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, New York Video Festival, and the 11thBiennale of Moving Images in Geneva. They have received grants from Art in General, NYSCA, Rhizome, Creative Capital and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and were residents at the CLUI, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and the Mac Dowell Colony.

Born near Detroit and raised in Los Angeles, Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Black Goat / Akashic Books 2008) and Black Peculiar, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press award for poetry. Individual poems appear widely in journals and anthologies including Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton Mifflin 2010), Villanelles (Random House 2012), jubilat and Eleven Eleven. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and curates the multicultural/multi-genre reading series Courting Risk.

Rachel Sherman holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Fence, Open City, Conjunctions, and n+1, among other publications. Her first book, The First Hurt, was short-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named one of the 25 Books to Remember in 2006 by the New York Public Library.  Her first novel, Living Room, was released in 2009, also to broad critical acclaim.  She teaches writing at Rutgers and Columbia Universities, and in Ditmas Park. She blogs for the Parenting Section of The Huffington Post.

 

Venue:  Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 6:45pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/

Come Check Out FPP at Our AWP Reading in Boston!

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We are thrilled to announce our line up for our reading at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) in Boston to be held Friday, March 8 @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level, F229. We have an incredible line up in Margo Jefferson,  Keya Mitra, and Justin Torres–with our own Amy Benson leading the discussion about the origins of the series and why we find so much possibility in the first person plural.  Here is a little more information about our readers:

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson. She was a staff writer for Newsweek and The New York Times and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, Her essays have been widely published, and anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death Best African American Essays, 2010; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. She’s also written and performed a theater, “Sixty Minutes in Negroland.” She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Gonzaga University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA.  In 2008, she spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.  Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation, and her nonfiction has been published in Gulf Coast and American Literary Review.  Her story received special mention in the Pushcart Prize XXXVII Anthology, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes.  She has completed a short story collection, a novel, and a memoir.

Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller; he is now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Amy Benson‘s prose has recently appeared in Triquarterly, BOMB Magazine, PANK, Boston Review, The New England Review, Seneca Review, Black Warrior Review, diagram, and Hotel Amerika, among other journals. Her book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 winner of the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

 

Announcing the Lineup for Our January 28th Reading!

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The next event in the First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series will be January 28th at Shrine.  Note that while we usually start at 7pm, we will begin at 6:45pm on the 28th since we have a special guest, international DJ Lady DM.   Lady DM will spin for 30 minutes, followed by readings by novelists Stacey D’Erasmo and Michael Thomas, and a performance by poet and multi-media artist Monica Ong.  Lady DM will close out the evening with another half hour set.  We’re excited to host such an artistically rich group!

With roots stemming from the legendary musical island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, Mackenzie Largie a.k.a. Lady DM describes herself as a ‘musical expat’, an apt description for her take on crossing genres of dance-able music. Lady DM’s story begins in 1995, in NYC as a host on FIT’s radio 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, a regular at venues like the Limelight, Orchard Bar, and The Cooler.  While based in Europe from 99’-10’, Lady DM regularly hosted radio shows in Zurich, and Berlin, while jetting around entertaining crowds at legendary parties like Amsterdam’s Mazzo Club, Zurich’s Lethargy festival, Milan’s Cox 18, Munich’s Muffathalle, and Berlin’s WMF. http://djladydm.tumblr.com/

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, and The Sky Below, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in July. She is a former Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim  Fellowship in Fiction. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Review , Bookforum, The New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. Her fourth novel, Wonderland, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in spring 2014. http://www.staceyderasmo.com/

The work of artist-poet Monica Ong investigates cultural silences in the context of public health. The silence of the daughter, the fear of losing face, and untranslated trauma, are aspects of the medical-emotional landscape that her work evokes. Monica completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research has included fellowships at the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University, and the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a Kundiman poetry fellow.  Her experimental image-poems have been published in the Lantern Review, The New Sound: A Journal of  Interdisciplinary Art & Literature, Drunken Boat, Tidal Basin Review, and will be featured in the forthcoming issue of the Glassworks Magazine. She was recently nominated by Tidal Basin Review for the 2012 Pushcart Poetry Prize.  Her narrative installations have been featured in exhibitions at the AC Institute in NYC, WomanMade Gallery of Chicago, and the Parachute Factory of New Haven, where she curated the exhibition Critical Condition, which collects medical narratives from diverse cultural communities. http://monicaong.com/

Michael Thomas is the author of Man Gone Down (Grove/Atlantic, 2007), a novel that follows a 35-year-old African-American man, broke and estranged from his white wife and three children, who has four days to keep his family afloat and reclaim his stake in the American Dream. The book was selected as one of the The New York Times Book Review’s top five novels of the year, as well as a New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book. In June 2009, Thomas was awarded the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—his novel was selected from 145 books nominated by libraries around the globe, of which four were from the US. In 2013, Thomas will publish a memoir, The Broken King, about four generations of men in his family. http://www.blueflowerarts.com/michael-thomas

Venue:  Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 6:45pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/

We Had the Best Time!

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Thank you to our readers/performers– Ashley Byler & Laurel Atwell, Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Phillip Lopate– for an incredible night of art and some FPP-style togetherness.  The night began with a tour through some of Stacy Parker Le Melle’s photographs of Harlem, full of rich color and striking angles.  Ashley Byler then presented her dance composition, “Accumulation: Variation No. 1 (a re-imagining of Trisha Brown’s 1971 work with Beyoncé Knowles as prescriber of pedestrian movement),” a deadpan mash-up of modernist repetition, sequined hot pants, and “Run the World (Girls).”  Jacqueline Jones LaMon read a series of poems, some from her collection, Last Seen, a haunting portrayal of long-term missing African-American children in the US.  We were particularly moved by her poems written this summer about the Rockaways and Coney Island, places now missing or wounded themselves.  Marie Myung-Ok Lee read a comic excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Firstborn Son, which details the vociferous protests a Korean-American doctor receives from his friends when he announces his plans to return to North Korea with Doctors Without Borders.  And Phillip Lopate treated us to razor-sharp political poems leading to a wry personal essay about his youthful ventures into politics and one particularly hilarious, (unintentionally) all-white Black Panthers Rally.  We also collected $238.27  in our Occupy Sandy collection box and donated here: http://interoccupy.net/occupysandy/.  Thanks for your generosity!  And thanks to performers and audience, alike, for giving us a memorable night!

FPP Harlem Reading this Monday: Let’s Get Together and Feel Alright…

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What a crazy week–a hurricane, its aftermath, a cancelled marathon,
an election, a nor’easter–these changes in routine brought New
Yorkers together in new ways. Join us at Shrine for more drama and
togetherness next Monday.

Ashley Byler will start things off with a performance to Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls),” followed by readings from Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Phillip Lopate.  We can’t wait to hear their work. As always, our event is FREE, though we will be collecting donations for Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. (An added bonus: Stacy Parker Le Melle, one of “us,” will share some of her Harlem photographs.  Her images are featured in the FPP event posters, like the one above.)

See you at 7:00pm!

Announcing the Lineup for Our November 12th Reading!

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The next event in the First Person Plural Harlem reading series will be November 12th at Shrine.  Authors Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Phillip Lopate, and dancer/choreographer Ashley Byler will be reading and performing work responding to the first person plural theme.  We can’t wait to see what this exciting group of artists brings to the First Person Plural stage!

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the author of two collections, Last Seen, a Felix Pollak Poetry Prize selection, and Gravity, U.S.A., recipient of the Quercus Review Press Poetry Series Book Award; and the novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me. A finalist for the 2012 NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature: Poetry, she lives in New York City and teaches at Adelphi University.   www.jacquelinejoneslamon.com.

 

 

 

Photograph by Miriam Berkley

Marie Myung-OK Lee is one of the few Americans who have ever been allowed into North Korea; she was a guest of the DPRK Government in 2009. Lee is an alumnus of Brown University, where she taught creative writing until 2011, and now teaches at Columbia University. She has also been a Fulbright Fellow (the first recipient of a creative writing Fulbright to South Korea), a judge for the National Book Awards and the RFK Book and Journalism Awards. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Atlantic, Guernica, her fiction in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, FiveChapters, and many other publications. She has been awarded fellowship residencies to Yaddo, MacDowell, and Ledig House, and was the recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fiction Fellowship, and is currently one of the nominees for the United States Artists Fellowship, awarded for an “extraordinary vision.”

 

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979.  He has written three personal essay collections—Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.)  In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003).  His most recent books are Two Marriages (novellas, Other Press, 2008),  Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), and At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), and the forthcoming Essay Love (personal essays) and To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (both to be published by Simon & Schsuter, March 2013).  www.philliplopate.com/

 

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.

 

Venue:

 

Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/


FPP Harlem: Season Premiere!

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FPP Harlem’s second season got off to a provocative start.  Paul La Farge began the night with a story that takes on, among other things, the dangers of self-delusion.  Lynne Tillman opened with a formidable “We,” reading the first lines of the Constitution. She then dug into her own American Genius: A Comedy reading passages that question the usefulness of history and its bearing on the present.  Wrapping up the night, LoVid performed two sound pieces, both very much in the first person plural—the first an intense improvisation between partners Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, the second a piece incorporating their unborn child through a fetal heart-rate monitor.  Thanks to our readers/performers, and thanks to our game, enthusiastic audience!  Our next reading will be on November 12th at Shrine—check back for our exciting lineup!