Category Archives: Lady DM

The FPP Season Kickoff Blew Us Away!

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What a privilege to have had Lacy M. Johnson, Kiese Laymon, and Tiphanie Yanique share the stage this past Monday for First Person Plural Harlem’s season opener.  It was a profound reading– not a word to be used lightly, and we don’t.

Lacy M. Johnson‘s latest book, The Other Side, recounts the harrowing experience of ljohnsonher kidnap and near murder at the hands of a former boyfriend.  Johnson read of the dreams that haunt her still– the expected nightmares of threats and violence, and the perhaps more disturbing dream of sitting down to a calm, comforting conversation with the man.  Through her children, Johnson showed us the lasting impact of the violence done to her.  “I want her to be a little afraid of me,” she writes of her daughter, a three-year-old as irrepressible as Johnson herself was as a child.  The traumatic event taught Johnson to retreat into herself, and in moving moment after moment, Johnson worries about how she closes the door on her children, forgetting how to open it again.

klaymonKiese Laymon decided to read an essay “from the heart,’ one he feels uncomfortable reading outside of his Mississippi birthplace, and we will be forever grateful that he did. “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” the titular essay of his recent collection, is a revelation about what it means to be a young black male in a country that is anything but post-racial.  Whereas wealthy/white youth have their foibles and serious crimes alike laughed off as growing pains, Laymon writes, “I was born on parole,” and “nineteen-year-old black boys cannot be perfect in America.” And while he writes of the ways his life might have and did go terribly sideways as a young man, he also finds deep empathy for, among others, his mother, wondering how he has failed to add love and comfort to her life. The essay was a wrenching tour de force.

Tiphanie Yanique read a section of her new novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which began with the musicality of poetry recounting the charmed life of an impossibly tyaniquecharismatic man from St. Thomas who joins the US Army in the time of Jim Crow.  We were spellbound as Yanique narrated a trip he and a few other “Islander” soldiers take to a restaurant near their New Orleans base.  The excursion nearly ends in tragedy as the realities of violent racism slowly– almost too slowly– sink in for the young men, unused to segregation and anticipating the respect the uniform should afford.  The beautiful, talented protagonist cannot believe the local men won’t listen to reason.  The whole of Shrine was leaning forward throughout, to see him safely through.

photo 2(1)Huge thanks to DJ Lady DM spinning us on home!  And thanks again to Lacy, Tiphanie, and Kiese for the work that your words do in the world.  We will not soon forget this reading!

Announcing our September 10 Lineup at Shrine, Harlem!

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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!

April 1, 2013: We Went Down Swingin’!

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Monday night was a rumble, a barn burner, a hot time in the still-cold city!  We had the best time at the last FPP reading of the season, in the company of Jericho Brown, eteam, Khadijah Queen, Rachel Sherman, and DJ Lady DM.

We were spellbound as Jericho Brown incanted poems about brutality and intimacy– between a boy and his father, between a mother and father, and between lovers.  He channeled Janis Joplin, writing of her throaty, desperate need, and then broadened to poems about the “we” of Harlem and of casual sex ads.  He sang it all, and we felt like we’d been to church (in a good way).

Multi-media artists eteam read from from their current project, “OS Grabeland.” For the project, they bought an allotment garden in former East Germany on ebay and became “landlords” to the farmers who use the garden.  They then recorded their tenants’ stories about the history of the land, but also declared the garden a cruise ship and took them on a virtual trip to American aboard it.  We got to hear the magical and disconcerting collision of the imagined and the real while photographs and video played in the background.

Next Khadijah Queen served up her singular and savvy wit, starting with a letter, “Dear Fear,” she’d written as part of the monumental Ann Hamilton show (“the event of a thread”) at the Armory earlier this year.  The letter portrayed a touching ambivalence in her relationship to fear– fear, in part, makes us, but it outlives its usefulness.  She read from her sharp and lightning quick poetry collections, Conduit and Black Peculiar, and closed with an excerpt from a hilarious “play” featuring biting social commentary disguised as dialogue between objects.

Rachel Sherman closed out the night with a story written expressly for the First Person Plural reading! In the brilliantly structured story, an unnamed group of employees (“we”) are charged with creating a coherent family movie from years of a wealthy business man’s home videos. The more they watch, the more concerned they grow for his wife, who despite, or perhaps because of, their four children, seems to be wasting away. The story was haunting and Rachel’s vision painfully acute.

Thanks again to our readers, to our bursting to the seams audience, and to DJ Lady DM who brought the live vibe!

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/

January 28, 2013: What a Great Night!

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The sleet deterred neither our artists nor our big, warm FPP audience!  We had a fabulous time listening to work by Stacey D’Erasmo, Monica Ong, and Michael Thomas, and to DJ Lady DM‘s groovy opening and closing sets.

Stacey D’Erasmo‘s forthcoming novel tells the comically bittersweet story of a singer trying to make a comeback years after her youthful success.  The excerpt D’Erasmo read led us into fascinating first person plural territory, as the main character recalls the making of her second album, a spectacular failure: seven musicians and producers hole up in a chateau and become a “we,” bonding over drugs and isolation and the mating calls of deer in the woods around them. But the artistic transcendence they feel never manifests in the music.  Monica Ong combined projected images and poems to stunning effect.  Her first image was a childhood photograph of her mother gathered with her mother and six siblings.  The accompanying poem revealed that her mother was one of the three “boys,” dressed and staged so that the family would not lose face from a surfeit of girls.  Her next images and poems brought us into human physiology, giving voice to the silent mechanisms of the body– to the body’s frightening failures and the way we fail our bodies through cultural mores and silence.  She closed with a moving poem written for the FPP reading in response to the Sandy Hook shootings.  Michael Thomas read an electrifying essay from his forthcoming collection.  He recounts a roadtrip he took with his brother who was recently arrested and floundering; as he departs, he fears the trip is ill-advised, that two black men on the highway at night are an easy target for police, and that his unrestrained, undiscriminating brother might threaten Thomas’s hard-won equilibrium and the privacy of mind he fiercely protects.  The essay was a challenge to the comfort and validity of the “we.”  Thank you to our readers for a compelling array of work and for their responses to the FPP theme.  Special thanks, again, to DJ Lady DM who closed out the night with more great music (that very nearly got us dancing– okay, maybe we danced a little)!

The FPP Interview: Mackenzie Largie aka Lady DM

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January 28 marks the first night we will open and close our reading with music, and spinning for us will be Mackenzie Largie, aka Lady DM.  We spoke to her about being a DJ’ane, Europe v America for black girls, and the Norwegian night she made headline news.

Zurich, Switzerland 1999

Would you share the origins of Lady DM? Lady DM stands for devotee of the Divine Mother. My guru is Amma. My vision is to heal people through music, as I’ve been healed as a kid growing up under very unfortunate circumstances. Music and dancing saved my life.  To read more of this interview, go here.

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/