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/