Harlem, NEW YORK—The FPP Harlem Collective hosts the opening reading in the First Person Plural Reading Series at the Shrine World Music Venue, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, novelist Sam Lipsyte, and cross-genre artists Mendi+Keith Obadike. The writers will read work written especially for the series, stories told from the “first person plural” or the “we” point-of-view. They will also read from other recent work. Admission is free.
Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton), Best African American Essays, 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of The Ask, Venus Drive, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book of 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, N+1, McSweeney’s, Tin House, NOON, The Quarterly, Esquire, GQ and Playboy, among other places. He is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.
Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art, and literature. Their work has been commissioned The NY African Film Festival / Electronic Arts Intermix, Northwestern University, Bucknell University, The Kitchen, The Yale Cabaret, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Rhizome / The New Museum, and The Whitney Museum of Art. They have released two albums on Bridge Records, a book of poetry with Lotus Press, and two forthcoming artist books on 1913 Press. They are currently working on a new series of sound installations and touring their opera-masquerade Four Electric Ghosts. www.blacknetart.com
For more information, contact: fppharlem [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com
Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
March 5, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/