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/
You published first as a critic. What effect did that training have on your first novel? And now? It was actually pretty liberating. For one thing, when I was first writing reviews, primarily for the Village Voice Literary Supplement, I was writing for a very smart, very welcoming and open-minded audience, so I truly felt that I could express myself without reservation. Also, I was writing on deadline, which meant that self-consciousness never had the time to overtake me. I got accustomed to taking risks. To read the rest of the interview, go here.
