Tag Archives: Max S. Gordon

FPP Interview: Max S. Gordon

Posted on by

max harlemIn this 2021 FPP Interview with Max S. Gordon, Gordon shares how he believes “the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer definitely lives on in the work of Stacey Abrams,” how difficult it is to sustain “relentless pain” in this country without wanting escape, about how his writing about Donald Trump has changed over four years, and so much more. Join us on Sunday, January 17th for “The Way Forward,” to hear Max S. Gordon read live, via Zoom, with writers Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Desiree C. Bailey, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Sara Lippmann, Gloria Nixon-John and Samantha So Lamb and Alex Torres who will be memorializing Anthony Veasna So. RSVP here.  – SPL

We have been so lucky that you’ve written an essay every year since 2016 for this post-election reading. I will never forget how in 2017 you told us about getting so angry and disgusted with Trump that you shouted at the TV: “The power of Fannie Lou Hamer compels you!” Looking at what Black women organizers and voters en masse achieved ever since, I think her power indeed compelled! How would you describe life over these past four years? What have you learned? Who gave you inspiration?

Thank you for remembering that essay, and for making that beautiful connection.  I believe the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer definitely lives on in the work of Stacey Abrams.  I am inspired by Ms. Abrams because I thought when she lost the governorship, they had snatched her dream and smashed it.  But clearly she had more than one dream – and spirit had a plan for her.  Now I think the powers that be wished they had made her governor because look at the trouble she’s caused! Being governor, in some ways, seems a smaller destiny when compared to how she has changed American history forever.

I watched her take pain, disappointment, outrage, and inspiration and apply it to a greater vision, which she and others alchemized into the result that brought us a win for Joe Biden in the presidential election and two democratic senators – a Black man and a Jewish man, who will now serve under a vice-president who is a Black woman.  In short, I needed that lesson from Stacey: don’t give up.

That was very important for me after four years of Donald Trump; it’s hard to have your heart broken over and over again.  It wears you down after a while, the lack of consequences, the lack of collective outrage, the complicity, the constant assaults, you can give up hope.  It’s important to see someone who hasn’t given up hope, who puts that hope into action. 

You’ve written movingly about addiction, and what it’s like for those in recovery to cope with our political circumstances. What gives you hope?  What keeps you frightened?

I see it all connected, all part of the same story.  I have a visceral response to Donald Trump; my body recognizes him energetically, as a recovering addict and as a child who grew up with trauma.  I can listen to others talk about Donald Trump all day long in terms of politics, but because of his malevolence, I know the child part of me wants to hide under the covers when I hear him coming up the stairs.  I try as often as I can to listen to that part of myself, especially when I write.  That was the child, who became the teenager, who became the adult who used drugs and alcohol to numb his pain.

To be clear: Donald Trump isn’t responsible for my addictions, but he has definitely triggered them, and I know I’m not alone in this.  There are probably millions of us who find ourselves struggling again with eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, post-traumatic stress disorders.  I’ve talked to friends who have gone on medication for the first time in their lives.  There have been overdoses and suicides. This isn’t weakness; something has been very wrong for years now, and it’s hard to sustain that level of relentless pain and not want to escape.

What’s scary is that everything we are dealing with now was foretold.  We have a library of information now on Donald Trump, but all we needed to know could have fit on the paper inside a fortune cookie.  “Grab ‘em by the p—-y” foreshadowed exactly what happened at the Capitol on January 6.  Many of us who recognized his personality disorders early, because we’d seen them in our own families, had been waiting for his rhetoric to result in a larger act of violence.  And that’s distressing on so many levels.  But I’m glad that I have a recovery that tells me, “Yes, Donald Trump is an abusive asshole; and no, that doesn’t give you permission to have a drink today.”

How has your writing changed over the past years?

At some point, I’d like to compile all the writing I’ve done on Donald Trump.  What a fascinating arc it has been!  And to think that sometimes, when I was shopping on 5th avenue in New York many years ago, I’d go to the basement of Trump Tower and have lunch; they had the most delicious pasta there.  While I ate, I didn’t think much about Donald Trump himself, I saw him as a grandiose fool; I’d never even watched a single episode of “The Apprentice.” I just never got around to it.

My first writings were more sympathetic; in 2016 I wrote about his being bewildered that he won the election and feeling lonely in the White House. I assigned him self-reflection, maybe because part of me wanted to believe he had some. I’ll admit, I was exhilarated by his sass in the Republican primaries of 2015 – I loved him taking down other Republicans.  There was danger from the very beginning, his behavior was already repulsive, but who believed he could actually win?

The last piece I wrote about Donald Trump included a conversation about prayer, because by 2020 his relentless cruelty and sociopathology had brought me to my knees.  And I don’t usually write about spirituality so overtly – that was different for me.  The question I had to ask myself last week after the Capitol insurrection was: did Donald Trump change, or did we?  Did he surprise us?  Because upon reflection, I feel that he has been extraordinarily consistent.  This doesn’t absolve him of any of his crimes; and I think that, as he fades into history, he will become less interesting.  But I think the question we will ask ourselves is not whether he changed, but how we allowed him to change us.  What did he reveal in us?  There is no question that he was definitely eager to take away our power; but why were we, as a country, so willing to give it to him?  That’s a question to make you sit down and think.

The Way Forward

Posted on by

Join us virtually on Sunday, January 17th, 2021 for “The Way Forward,” a reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Desiree C. Bailey, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Max S. Gordon, Sara Lippmann, Gloria Nixon-John, and Samantha So Lamb and Alex Torres who will read in memory of Anthony Veasna So. The reading is curated and hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. This is our fifth annual post-election reading, but instead of our focus being on “what just happened?” our readers will share work that speaks to what we must hold on to, what we must seek, what we must know and learn and feel as we find our way forward. The reading is from 6-8pm. Admission is free.

Please RSVP via Eventbrite here. You will be sent log-in instructions prior to the event.

About the readers:

ibrahim_west coast smile_Ibrahim is a bright, playful spirit who authentically reflects and acts on bold questions. His artful blending of idealism and spiritual commitment with pragmatic application has led him into government, public administration, parenthood, and media. His unique voice has helped elevate the environmental vision of Islam, the spiritual opportunity of parenting, and the cultural and political side of sports and the ethical imperative when considering decisions about how we manage land, waters, and open space.

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is an urban strategist whose work focuses on deepening democracy and improving public engagement. He has advised two mayors on the best ways to translate complex decisions related to the cost, impacts, and benefits of environmental policy on communities. He is the founder of Green Squash Consulting a management consulting firm based in New York that works with people, organizations, companies, coalitions and governments committed to equity and justice. He is the author of Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet and in addition to the New York Advisory Board of the Trust for Public Land he is sits on the board of the International Living Future Institute encouraging the creation of a regenerative built environment and Sapelo Square whose mission is to celebrate and analyze the experiences of Black Muslims in the United States.

DesireeCBaileyHeadshot_CreditWiltonScherekaDesiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and grew up in Queens, NY.

IMG_3019Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto’s third collection, [Elegies], is published by Flower Song Press and his second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books.  Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press.

His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others.

He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp.

A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

max .JPG pic for StaceyMax S. Gordon is a writer and activist. His work has also appeared on openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, Sapience, and other progressive on-​line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally.  His essays include “The Eroticism of Brutality – On Mary Trump’s ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’ and “How We’ll Get Over: Going to The Upper Room with Donald Trump.”

IMG-1665Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collections Doll Palace, long-listed for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and JERKS (forthcoming from Mason Jar Press.) She was awarded an artist’s fellowship in fiction from New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Millions, Fourth Genre, Slice Magazine, Diagram, Epiphany and elsewhere. She’s landed on Wigleaf’s Top 50, and her stories have been anthologized in Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting (San Diego City Works Press) and forthcoming in New Voices: Contemporary Voices Confronting the Holocaust (Blue Lyra Press) and Best Small Fictions 2020 (Sonder Press). Raised outside of Philadelphia, she lives and teaches in Brooklyn and co-hosts the Sunday Salon NYC.

Screen Shot 2020-12-29 at 8.26.15 PMGloria Nixon-John, Ph.D.  Gloria’s novel The Killing Jar is based on the true story of one of the youngest Americans to have served on death row.  Her memoir entitled Learning from Lady Chatterley is written in narrative verse and is set in Post WWII Detroit.  Her chapbook, Breathe me a Sky, was recently published by The Moonstone Art Center of Philadelphia.  She has published poetry, fiction, and essays in several literary journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by A3 of London. Many of her essays and poems deal with her love of gardening, and with her love of, and care for, her horses.

Gloria has collected an oral history of sculptor Marshall Fredericks for The Marshall Fredrick’s museum in Saginaw Michigan and has done oral history work for the Theodore Roethke House, also in Saginaw, Michigan.  She currently works as an independent writing consultant for schools, libraries, and individual writers. Gloria lives in rural Oxford, Michigan with her horses, dogs, cats, husband Michael.

imageAs Anthony Veasna So agreed to read for “The Way Forward” just days before he passed away in San Francisco, CA, I am grateful to be able to keep Anthony as part of the lineup in order to remember him and to honor his work. He will be memorialized by his sister Samantha So Lamb and his partner Alex Torres. – SPL

Anthony Veasna So (deceased) is a graduate of Stanford University and earned his MFA in Fiction at Syracuse University. His debut story collection, Afterparties, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in August 2021, and his writing has been or will be published in The New Yorker, n+1, Granta, and ZYZZYVA. Born and raised in Stockton, CA, he lived in San Francisco, where he worked on an essay collection and a stoner novel of queer ideas about three Khmer American cousins—a pansexual rapper, a comedian philosopher, and a leftist illustrator.

Screen Shot 2020-12-29 at 5.58.11 PMSamantha So Lamb was born and raised in Stockton, California. Her parents are Cambodian refugees who escaped the Khmer Rouge. First in her family to graduate from college, Samantha decided to become a teacher. She dedicates her career to teaching elementary grades in urban neighborhoods and deeply believes in equitable access to rigorous education for all students, especially black and brown children. She currently lives and teaches in Richmond, California with her husband, her son, and dog.

IMG_6116

 

Alex Torres has taught English in Bogotá, Colombia as a Fulbright Scholar, reported on venture capitalists & startups for Business Insider, and published academic research on nineteenth and twentieth-century US literary culture.

 

 

Curator and Host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project.  She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Callaloo, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.

What Just Happened? Writers Respond to Our American Crises – 2019 Edition

Posted on by

FPP-Poster-102819Join us on Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem for an evening of politics, culture, history and catharsis featuring writers Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Max S. Gordon, David Tomas Martinez, Nara Milanich, Ed Morales and Sarah Van Arsdale, hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. This is our fourth annual election-time reading and if we can judge by the three prior readings, this one will be exceptional. You’ll leave energized. The reading is from 6-8pm. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Books sold by Word Up! Books. Admission is free. There will be cake!

Please RSVP via Eventbrite here.

About the Featured Writers:

ibrahim headshot (1) (1)Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is an urban strategist whose work focuses on deepening democracy and improving public engagement. He has advised two mayors on the best was to translate complex decisions related to the cost, impacts, and benefits of environmental policy and of capital projects on communities. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies on sustainability and innovation. Previously, Ibrahim developed tools to connect, train, and fund grassroots activists. Since 2018, Ibrahim has worked with governments, CBO’s, and select corporate clients providing strategy and support around infrastructure policy, the land use process, strategies for climate adaptation and resilience. He is the author of Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet and earned his MPA at Baruch College’s Marxe School where he now lectures, serves on the Board of the International Living Future Institute and is a founding facilitator of the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners.

70003471_10156625474331302_3166876650893737984_n-1(1)Max S. Gordon is a writer and activist. He has been published in the anthologies Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews and Latinos (University of Michigan Press, 1991), Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of African- American Lesbian and Gay Fiction (Henry Holt, 1996). His work has also appeared on openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, and other progressive online and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally. His essays include “Bill Cosby, Himself, Fame, Narcissism and Sexual Violence”, “Resist Trump: A Survival Guide”, “Family Feud: Jay-Z, Beyoncé and the Desecration of Black Art”, “A Little Respect, Just a Little Bit: On White Feminism and How ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is Being Weaponized Against Women of Color”, and “Sticks and Stones Will Break Your Bones: On Patriarchy, Cancel Culture and Dave Chappelle”.

hi-res headshot(1)

 

David Tomas Martinez is the author of two collections of poetry, Hustle and Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, both from Sarabande Books. Martinez is a Pushcart winner, CantoMundo fellow, a Breadloaf Stanley P. Young Fellow, NEA poetry fellow, and NEA Big Read author. Martinez lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

Milanich_faculty portrait(1)Nara Milanich is Professor of Latin American History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She teaches and researches the history of family, childhood, reproduction, gender, and law. Her most recent book, Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019), came out in June and received coverage in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Salon, NPR, Scientific American, CNN, and Time, among other places. The book explores the quest for a scientific proof of paternity and the social questions that, over the course of the twentieth century, these new genetic technologies were called on to answer. One of the book’s arguments is that since the Cold War, genetic tests of parentage have been used in immigration proceedings to fix the racial boundaries of the nation. Milanich has also worked as a translator and legal assistant for Central American mothers and children incarcerated in the country’s largest immigrant detention center, located in Dilley, Texas. She has written about this experience in the Washington Post, Dissent, and NACLA: North American Congress on Latin America. Last semester, she taught a class on the asylum crisis and took her undergraduate students to work in the detention center.

Screen Shot 2019-10-25 at 12.24.16 PMEd Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, and The Guardian. He was staff writer at The Village Voice and columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture (Verso Books, 2018), Living in Spanglish (St. Martins, 2002), and The Latin Beat: From Rumba to Rock (Da Capo Press, 2003). His new book, Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico was published in September 2019 by Bold Type Press. Morales is also a poet whose work has appeared in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1993) and various small magazines, and his fiction has appeared in Iguana Dreams (HarperCollins, 1992), and Boricuas (Ballantine, 1994). He has participated in residencies as a member of Nuyorican Poets Café Live, touring as a spoken-word performer in several cities throughout the east coast, in California, Florida, Texas, and Denmark. Morales has appeared on CNN, Democracy Now, HBO Latino, CNN Español, WNBC-TV’s Visiones, WABC’s Tiempo, BBC television and radio, and The Laura Flanders Show, and hosted his own radio show, “Living in Spanglish,” on WBAI-FM in New York from 2015–2018.

Screen Shot 2019-10-25 at 12.37.06 PM

 

Sarah Van Arsdale is the award-winning author of five books of fiction and poetry. She teaches in the Antioch/LA low-residency MFA program and at NYU, and leads writing workshops in Oaxaca, Mexico and Freeport, Maine. She co-curates the BLOOM reading series in Washington Heights.

 

About the Host:

C6OB4li__400x400Stacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco) and is a contributing editor to Callaloo. She was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s) and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, The Offing, Apogee Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, Entropy, The Butter, Cura, The Atlas Review, and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle is the founder of Harlem Against Violence, Homophobia, and Transphobia, and the curator and co-founder of Harlem’s First Person Plural Reading Series.

 

About Word Up Books:

Screen Shot 2019-10-18 at 6.59.10 PMWord Up is a multilingual, general-interest community bookshop and arts space in Washington Heights, New York City, committed to preserving and building a neighborhood in which all residents help each other to live better informed and more expressive lives, using books as an instrument of reciprocal education and exchange, empowering not only themselves, but their community. Word Up is run by volunteers from the uptown community. By hosting readings, concerts, screenings, art exhibitions, talks and workshops, community meetings, and other activities for kids and adults, we do our best to support and fortify the creative spirit unique to our diverse, uptown community.

 

What Just Happened? Writers Respond to Our American Crises

Posted on by

Join us on Sunday, November 18th at Silvana in Harlem for an evening of politics, culture, and history featuring writers Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Judith Baumel, Tanya Domi, Max S. Gordon, Ricardo Hernandez, Ruby Shamir, and Vanessa K.Valdés. This is our third year hosting a post-election reading and if we can judge by the two prior readings, this one will be special. You’ll leave energized. The reading is from 6-8pm. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free. There will be cake!

ibrahim headshot (1) (1)-2Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is an author, radio contributor, and environmental policy consultant. He has appeared on FOX News, Al-Jazeera, ABC News, and contributed to “The Takeaway.” As a writer, he’s appeared in The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Daily Beast, GOOD Magazine, ColorLines, Wiretap and Elan Magazine. His is the author of the book “Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet” and contributor to All-American: 45 American Men On Being Muslim. He is a former sustainability policy advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and member of the founding team of the Brooklyn Academy for Science and the Environment. He currently serves as the Director of Community Affairs at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and on the board of the International Living Future Institute. Ibrahim earned a BA in History and Political Science from University of Rhode Island and a master’s in public administration from Baruch College, City University of New York.

PotraitJudy-2

 

Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. A recent Fulbright Fellow in Italy at the University of Genoa, she is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.  Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers, Now, and The Kangaroo Girl.

 

 

DOMI_A (002) Vlodkowsky originalTanya Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate of the Harriman Institute where she teaches human rights and international relations in the Western Balkans. Prior to joining the faculty in 2008, Domi served in the U.S. Army for 15 years and later worked for the late Congressman Frank McCloskey (D-IN-8), serving as his defense policy analyst in the early 1990s during the run-up to the Bosnian war. Domi was seconded by the U.S. State Department to the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina 1996-2000 and served as Spokesperson, Counselor to the Head of Mission and Chair of the OSCE Media Experts Commission. Domi has worked in a dozen countries, including Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia regarding democratic, economic, media and political transitional development, as well as human rights and gender/sexual identity issues. Domi is a widely published author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Magazine, Al Jazeera America, The Christian Science Monitor, The Balkanist, Balkan Insight, Radio Free Europe and The Institute for War and Peace Reporting. She is a graduate of Central Michigan University where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Political Science in 1982 and earned a Masters of Arts degree at Columbia University in Human Rights in 2007. She is currently writing a book on the LGBTI human rights movement in the Western Balkans.

Maxie picMax S. Gordon is a writer and performer. He has been published in the anthologies Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews and Latinos (University of Michigan Press, 1991), Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of African-​American Lesbian and Gay Fiction (Henry Holt, 1996). His work has also appeared on openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, and other progressive on-​line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally. His essays include “Bill Cosby, Himself, Fame, Narcissism and Sexual Violence”, “A Different World: Why We Owe The Cosby Accusers An Apology”, “Resist Trump: A Survival Guide”, and “Family Feud: Jay-Z, Beyoncé and the Desecration of Black Art”

RicardoHernandez-2

 

Ricardo Hernandez is the son of Mexican immigrants. A recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and Poets House, his work has appeared most recently in The Offing, Foundry, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s an MFA candidate at Rutgers-Newark.

 

 

3019488Ruby Shamir is an award-winning author, a ghostwriter, an adaptor of adult non-fiction for children, and a literary researcher based in New York City.  She’s performed research, editorial planning, editing, and writing for many high profile non-fiction best-sellers, including books by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, and Tom Brokaw.  Her work as a ghost-writer has been reviewed as “lyrical,” “eloquent,” “winning,” “thoughtful,” “personal and appealing.” To The Moon, her middle grade adaptation of Jeffrey Kluger’s Apollo 8, received a starred review from the School Library Journal.  Shamir writes a series of picture books on American history and civics.  What’s the Big Deal About Elections came out last August to favorable reviews. What’s the Big Deal About First Ladies, (Philomel, 2017) received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.  That book and What’s the Big Deal About Freedom (Philomel, 2017) were chosen for the International Literacy Association Children’s Choice Award list.  Her public policy and political experience includes working for three and a half years in the Clinton White House and leading Hillary Rodham Clinton’s New York Senate office as well as policy development work for the AFL-CIO and writing coaching for the marketing department at IBM.

AVQ6XXce4_b7Wav1dCqBNUZCEnlvmfxzvUKVCHph650 (1) (1)Born and raised here in New York City, Vanessa K. Valdés is an associate professor at The City College of New York. In addition to the languages of Spanish and Portuguese, she teaches on the African diaspora in the Americas, that is, the histories and literatures of Black peoples in Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean, and their communities here in the United States. Her most recent book is Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017): it is the first to situate Mr. Schomburg squarely within his Black Latinx identity.

FPP Interview: Max S. Gordon

Posted on by

FPP spoke with essayist Max S. Gordon via email about the struggle to keep Trump out of our thoughts and conversations, how Pence needs to know he is not going back in the closet for him, and so much more. Come out to Shrine on Tuesday, November 7th when he joins Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Yarimar Bonilla, Keesha Gaskins-Nathan, PJ Marshall, Matthew Olzmann, Suzanne Russell and Carla Shedd for One Year Later: Writers, Artists, & Advocates Respond to Our American Crisis.

662F67E4-ED6C-4C62-B352-5297B7376F08What has this year been like for you? Bizarre.  Even now, a year later, when I watch the news it still has a surreal quality. I see Trump at the podium, and I feel like, “This couldn’t have really happened, could it?”  In some ways, I hope I never lose that feeling.  I am very determined that this never be okay.

One of the most difficult things is keeping him out of my head. I have friends who are anti-Trump, but they won’t stop talking about him, day and night. I understand following the news, but they don’t seem to understand that Trump is a narcissist, and on some level, narcissists don’t care whether you hate them or not, they just want you to keep them on the brain. It doesn’t matter, as long as they are the only conversation. I consider it a victory if I have a few hours a day where I haven’t thought or talked about him.

How have Trump’s politics and policies affected you and your communities? How have you been unaffected? I notice I’ve been keeping my eye on people, trying to locate who is a bit sassier during this administration, who feels more empowered to harm. I feel we are in the testing stage, it’s still pretty early, and we’re all watching each other, thinking, how far will this shit go?  What can I get away with? I think Trump feels the same way.  One wants to be vigilant without being paranoid, but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

The other day I was walking along a path in the woods in upstate, NY, and there was a white family in front of me. A couple in the group was distracted and stood completely in my way and they didn’t move. I had to very obviously walk around them. They didn’t acknowledge me or apologize for taking up the entire space on the road.  It was like I wasn’t even there. I was so pissed. And the first thought I had was, “Is this going to be life in the Trump era?  Black Invisibilty?”

Now, to be fair, the same thing could have happened if I had been white.  They might have just been rude people. But I’m not white. And the fact that I was thinking that, that I was worried, means that Trump is affecting me on a deeper psychological level.  The way you know he’s won is when you wake up one morning and decide not to go for a walk in the woods because you don’t want to have to risk dealing with that humiliation, that shame.  The park then becomes all white.  And that’s how it begins – that’s how the world gets smaller and smaller.

Has the current political moment affected your art or work life? If yes, how so?  I’d like to think it has encouraged me to be bolder, to take more risks. That’s why I chose this picture. I think there is a process of coarsening that is taking place right now, a cultural homogenization. We can talk about walls, and bans, but it’s really all the same – it’s a war on difference.

Now Trump, on some level, no matter how much he panders to his base, is a New Yorker, and his time on The Apprentice means that he will always be a part of the celebrity freak show.  It’s Mike Pence I’m really talking about here.

I wrote about Pence when he was governor, and my message to him was, in short, I’m not going back into the closet for you.  People act like “the closet” is some cosy little space where you hang your shirts and jackets, where you keep a rack for your shoes, and a shelf where you tuck your sexual orientation until you’re ready to tell the world.  But I think the closet for many LGBTQ people looks more like those tunnels in the movie, It.  Sometimes you don’t know if you’re going to make it out of that shit alive.  That’s why we have to keep telling the truth, and boldly.

What didn’t you see coming?  Megyn Kelly hosting the Today Show.  For some reason I feel really violated by that. I read her book, Settle for More when I was in London and what I found out about Kelly is that she comes from a pretty liberal family and community–we could have gone to the same high school. In other words, I think she had to contort herself into this racist thing she became on Fox News.  She’s deeply contrived. And I’m offended that now on The Today Show she’s what she should have been all along–and she seems to be getting away with it.

I watch her studio audience sitting behind her and it feels like something from The Handmaid’s Tale.  I’ve heard her talk about sexual harassment and I very much admire her sexual harassment fight against Fox.  But I’d love for someone to ask her, “Has your consciousness about victimization and women translated to having more compassion for people of color and racial injustice?”  I can hear her now, “And we’ll be right back.”

What should people focus on right now?  A good friend of mine, the filmmaker Iyatunde Folayan, often talks about finding sanctuary.  I think we need to locate those places where we are accepted 100% for who we are.  In some cases, that may only be the bathroom mirror.  We need to know where we are welcome, where we can express ourselves and not be reduced.  I’m experimented right now with resistance through sensuality.  I’m not saying we don’t still march, and act up, but when the black body is in peril, bath oils and candles can be a form of resistance.  Right now, I’m dealing with my addictions to Coca-Cola and McDonald’s again because I’m really frightened when I read about Trump and North Korea and those are my childhood “fear foods” – they always pop up when I’m terrified.

Resistance for me must involve examining my self care as a man who is gay and black.  It’s what my recovery from alcohol and drug addiction is about.  I saw a black woman the other day in New York, beautiful in a yellow dress, so vibrant, absolutely radiant.   Seeing her, in some way, helped me to deal with this whole Trump thing in a way I can’t exactly describe.  But I do know that self care is an important part of one’s personal protest – especially when you come from a targeted group.

What gives you hope? The truth telling that’s been happening around bullies, and in particular, bullies and sexual assault.  I’ve written at length about Bill Cosby, but it is amazing to see the conversation taking place now around R. Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and especially Harvey Weinstein. With Harvey, there seems to be an unprecedented level of accountability. Anyone who was near him has to come forward and answer, “What did you know? And why didn’t you do anything?” It’s like Judgement at Nuremberg. And because of Weinstein’s power globally, this news has influenced the world. I’d like to think we’re moving closer to ending the reign of the entitled male, (and we’re finding out he can be a Democrat or Republican, straight or gay). If we are, the whole world is going to change, maybe overnight.

Is there a person, or a community, or artwork, or anything at all that has inspired you these past days?  I’ve always been interested in Harriet Tubman. For me, she’s the original Wonder Woman. I marvel at her courage and her accomplishments. And she inspires me because it’s so tempting to think, “I can’t shine right now or be in my full glory because things are so bad in 2017.” But, I imagine things were pretty shitty in 1849, and that didn’t stop her from escaping in her late twenties and returning 17 more times to help others go free. Harriet teaches me: you shine where you are from who you are. The rest is weather.

When you visualize a bright future, what do you see?  What do you hear? I am a child of the Seventies, inspired by “Free to Be…You and Me”, “Big Blue Marble”, “Vegetable Soup“.  I feel those works encouraged compassion and understanding, an appreciation for difference. So I am not ashamed to say, I visualize love and kindness.  I think Republicans and Democrats both have a lot to answer for. We play so many bullshit games when there is serious need out here in these streets. The bright future I see is an end to so many people’s suffering and pain.  Life is challenging, I think we all know this, but it shouldn’t be this hard for so many.  I keep seeing all these news reports about the opiod crisis, the opiod crisis.  We don’t have an opiod crisis, we have a crisis of heartbreak.

The beautiful singer, Nancy Lamott had a song called, “We Can Be Kind“.  And it’s true.  I think we have to look for sanctuary in small acts of lovingkindness. Sometimes I don’t know if we have ten years or ten minutes left with this man in office, but I do know that I can go downstairs to the deli in the next moment and be kind to someone. And maybe the next moment is the only one that matters.

One Year Later: Writers, Artists, & Advocates Respond to Our American Crisis

Posted on by

One year ago, Donald J. Trump was declared winner of the 2016 US Presidential Election. We’ve been coping with crises – new, and continued – ever since. Join us on Tuesday, November 7th (7-9pm) at Shrine Harlem as acclaimed writers, artist, and advocates respond. Bring your responses, too – they’ll be room for audience participation. Featured participants: Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Yarimar Bonilla, Keesha Gaskins-Nathan, Max S. Gordon, PJ Marshall, Matthew Olzmann, Suzanne Russell, and Carla Shedd. Shrine is located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd between 133rd and 134th, near the 2/3 135th stop and the B/C 135th stop. Admission is free.

ibrahim headshot (1) (1)Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is an author, radio contributor, and environmental policy consultant. He has appeared on FOX News, Al-Jazeera, ABC News, and contributed to “The Takeaway.” As a writer, he’s appeared in The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Daily Beast, GOOD Magazine, ColorLines, Wiretap and Elan Magazine. His is the author of the book Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet and contributor to All-American: 45 American Men On Being Muslim. He is a former sustainability policy advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and member of the founding team of the Brooklyn Academy for Science and the Environment. He currently serves as the Director of Community Affairs at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and on the board of the International Living Future Institute. Ibrahim earned a BA in History and Political Science from University of Rhode Island and a master’s in public administration from Baruch College, City University of New York.  

Yari B&WYarimar Bonilla is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latino & Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University and currently a visiting scholar at the Russel Sage Foundation where she is completing a manuscript about Puerto Rico’s political, economic, and environmental crisis. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment and one of the founders of the website: Puerto Rico Syllabus: Essential Tools for Critical Thinking about the Puerto Rican Debt Crisis.

Screen Shot 2017-10-20 at 1.40.12 PMKeesha Gaskins-Nathan is the director for the Democratic Practice–United States program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Ms. Gaskins-Nathan is a long-time organizer, lobbyist, and trial attorney. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, she was senior counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, serving as the director of the Redistricting and Representation program. Her portfolio included redistricting reform, voting rights, and elections, with a focus on voter suppression issues. Ms. Gaskins-Nathan is a frequent lecturer and writer on issues related to women and politics, movement building, and democratic reform. She is the author of a number of articles and publications related to voter suppression, voting rights, and redistricting. Ms. Gaskins-Nathan served as executive director for the League of Women Voters Minnesota, where she worked on a wide range of voting rights and civil rights issues. Prior to that, she was the executive director for the Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus. She worked for a number of years as a trial attorney, most notably with the firm Bowman and Brooke, LLC. Ms. Gaskins-Nathan also served as a special assistant appellate public defender for the State of Minnesota. She is a frequent commentator on voting rights and redistricting reform and regularly appears on numerous news and public affairs programming, including past appearances on PBS’s NewsHour, MSNBC, and Bill Moyers.

IMG_0985Max S. Gordon is a writer and performer. He has been published in the anthologies Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews and Latinos (University of Michigan Press, 1991), and Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of African-American Lesbian and Gay Fiction (Henry Holt, 1996).  His work has also appeared at The New Civil Rights Movement, openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, Sapience, and other progressive on-line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally.  His published essays include, “Bill Cosby, Himself: Fame, Narcissism and Sexual Violence”; “Be Glad That You Are Free: On Nina, Miles Ahead, Lemonade, Lauryn Hill and Prince”, “The Cult of Whiteness” and “Faggot as Footnote: On ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, ‘Can I Get A Witness’, and ‘Moonlight'”.

Olzmann AJB 1Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was
selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books.  His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day and elsewhere.  He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a lecturer at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

P+J+Marshall+hFE62BCSeRmm

PJ Marshall is an American actor known for his versatility, forceful onscreen presence, and athleticism. He began his career with guest roles on television, appearing on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Oz, and Law & Order: L.A. Marshall soon added movies to his resume, appearing in a variety of films, from Mississippi Grind, staring Ryan Reynolds, to Catch .44, starring Forest Whitaker, to Maggie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Recent television credits include the plantation overseer Bill Meekes on WGN’s Underground, Detective Jack Colquitt on American Horror Story. His stage work includes Off-Broadway productions of Reservoir Dogs, Getting Out, Trailerville, Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind and Fool for Love, for which he received a Garland Award nomination. Prior to becoming an actor, Marshall was a professional dancer, martial artist, and competitive surfer. He studied acting at the Wynn Handman Studio.

IMG_2391

Suzanne Russell is an activist artist, writer, and lawyer living in Copenhagen and New  York. A big part of her social art practice for the past ten years has been providing free legal and social support to refugees, mostly unaccompanied teenagers in Europe. Since the election in 2016, Suzanne has been focusing on changing the political system in USA through a combination of artistic and practical actions. She is currently a graduate student at San Francisco Institute of Art and a volunteer lawyer for immigrants in the USA and Europe.

 

Screen Shot 2017-10-20 at 1.37.17 PMCarla Shedd is Associate Professor of Urban Education and Sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Shedd received her Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests focus on: race/ethnicity; crime/criminal justice; law/inequality; urban education, and urban policy. Shedd’s book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice (October 2015, Russell Sage), has won multiple academic awards including the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award given to the top book on social inequality each year. Unequal City deeply probes the intersections of race, place, education, and the expansion of the American carceral state using Chicago’s stratified education and residential landscape as its site of investigation. Shedd’s current research focuses on New York City’s juvenile justice system assessing how young people’s linked institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum. 

What Just Happened? Writers Respond to the 2016 Presidential Election

Posted on by

fpp-poster-111516-finalOn Tuesday, November 15th, FPP will focus on the 2016 presidential election. As in: what just happened? We have a fantastic lineup of writers to help us make sense of  – or complicate further – what has been a wild and wrenching year: Ibrahim Abdul-Matin; Grace Aneiza Ali; Hafizah Geter; Max S. Gordon; Hajar Husseini; Morgan Jerkins; and Chris Prioleau. We want to hear from you, too. Audience participation will be part of this program.

7:00pm-9:00pm at Shrine World Music Venue, 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.Near the 2/3 135th stop, and the B/C 135th stop.Happy Hour until 8pm. Cake will be served. Admission is free. Come talk politics, resistance, and the way forward with us in Harlem!

ibrahim-abdul-matinIbrahim Abdul-Matin is the author of Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet and contributor to All-American: 45 American Men On Being Muslim. He is a former sustainability policy advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and founder of the Brooklyn Academy for Science and the Environment. In 2013, Ibrahim was honored by NBC’s TheGrio.com as one of 100 African Americans Making history today. He currently serves as the Director of Community Affairs at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. He has experience in the civic, public, and private sectors, and with government, public administration, and media. Ibrahim earned a BA in History and Political Science from University of Rhode Island and a master’s in public administration from Baruch College, City University of New York.

grace-ali-headshot-2014Grace Aneiza Ali is an independent curator, faculty member in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and Editorial Director of OF NOTE — an award-winning online magazine on art and activism. She has served as Editor & Digital Curator for several of the magazine’s art and social justice issues, including: The Water Issue, The Burqa Issue, The Imprisoned Issue, and The Immigrant Issue. Her essays on photography have been published in Harvard’s Transition Magazine, Nueva Luz Journal, Small Axe Journal, among others. In 2014, she received the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellowship. In 2016, she served as curator for Un|Fixed Homeland at Aljira, a Center of Contemporary Art, an exhibition which brought together global Guyanese artists using photography to explore issues of migration and diaspora. Highlights of her curatorial work include Guest Curator for the 2014 Addis Ababa Foto Fest; Guest Curator of the Fall 2013 Nueva Luz Photographic Journal; and Co-Curator/Host of the Visually Speaking photojournalism public program series at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center. Ali is a World Economic Forum ‘Global Shaper’ and Fulbright Scholar. She holds an M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she graduated magna cum laude. Ali was born in Guyana and lives in New York City.

hafizah-geterHafizah Geter is a 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Drunken Boat, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She is on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, a poetry editor for Phantom Books and co-curates the reading series EMPIRE with Ryann Stevenson.

 

max-s-gordonMax S. Gordon is a writer and performer. He has been published in the anthologies Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews and Latinos (University of Michigan Press, 1991), and Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of African-American Lesbian and Gay Fiction (Henry Holt, 1996).  His work has also appeared at The New Civil Rights Movement, openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, Sapience, and other progressive on-line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally.  His recent published essays include, “Bill Cosby, Himself: Fame, Narcissism and Sexual Violence”; “The Cult of Whiteness: On Donald Trump, #OscarsSoWhite and the end of America” and “Be Glad That You are Free: On Nina, Miles Ahead, Lemonade, Lauryn Hill and Prince”.

hajar-husseiniHajar Husseini was born in 1991 in Iran to an Afghan immigrant family. After the collapse of the Taliban regime, her family came back to Afghanistan when she was thirteen. After graduation from high school, she worked for several non-profit organizations. She started writing for Afghan Women Writing Project in April 2015. Her involvement with AWWP lead her to collaborate on a song about domestic violence with Eleanor Dubinsky. Currently based in Troy, NY, she attends The Sage Colleges where she received a full undergraduate scholarship from the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women to study “Writing and Contemporary Thought.” She wants to become a writer, a journalist, and a literary translator.

morgan-jerkinsMorgan Jerkins is a writer living in Harlem. Besides being a Contributing Editor at Catapult, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, ELLE, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and BuzzFeed, among many others. Her debut essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial.  She received her Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College.

chris-prioleau

Chris Prioleau earned his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where he taught creative writing and helped found Apogee Journal, a journal of art and literature featuring work that explores and challenges identity politics.  Chris writes fiction, essays, and sketch comedy. His work has been featured on The Awl and at sketch comedy events throughout the city. Chris is the Development & Communications Manager for NY Writers Coalition and lives in Brooklyn.