Nine Years of First Person Plural Begins February 9, 2020 at Silvana Harlem!

Posted on January 20, 2020 by admin

Please join us for the first reading of our ninth year on Sunday, February 9^th for a reading that promises to delight and amaze! We’ll be joined by poets and writers Lilly Dancyger, Sam Perkins, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Sarah Van Arsdale, and Mimi Wong, hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. 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 our featured readers:

Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor and columnist at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press; and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, forthcoming in 2021. Lilly is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, and her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on Twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).

Sam Perkins is a writer, editor, translator based in New York City. Perkins’ nonfiction features on history, art and culture have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Atlas Obscura, and History.com. His writing appears regularly on SilentMasters.net, a site devoted to historically significant architecture and design. His anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, Thirteen Leaves, co-translated with Joan Xie, appeared in August 2018 (Three Owls Press). With Sarah Van Arsdale, he co-curates a monthly literary reading series, Bloom Readings in Washington Heights. He is working on completing his first chapbook of poetry.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, which was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The novel, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK), has been hailed as “ambitious and sweeping” (Esquire) and “a remarkable debut” (Financial Times) with a narrative that “recreates the experience of living in Thailand’s aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles” (Washington Post). It has also been named a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Casa delle Letterature Bridge Book Award, and the Edward Stanford Award. Sudbanthad has been honored with fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Among the publications to which he has contributed are: Newsweek, Freeman’s, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Millions, and The Morning News. Born in Thailand, he currently splits time between Bangkok and Brooklyn.

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.

Mimi Wong is Editor in Chief of The Offing, a literary magazine dedicated to centering marginalized voices. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Catapult, Crab Orchard Review, Day One, Electric Literature, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, Refinery29, and Wildness. In 2019, she was awarded an Art Writers Grant by Creative Capital and The Andy Warhol Foundation. She is a graduate of New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

About the host:

Stacy 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, Silk Road Review, 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.

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

Posted on October 25, 2019 by admin

Join 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 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.

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”.

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.

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.

Ed 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.

About the Host:

Stacy 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:

Word 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.

Join Us in Harlem on Sunday, February 17th at Silvana!

Posted on February 4, 2019 by admin

Welcome to the First Person Plural’s seventh year of showcasing literary and artistic excellence in Harlem, USA! Our next reading features authors Amanda Alcántara, Tyehimba Jess, Jacinda Townsend, and Vanessa K. Valdés on Sunday, February 17th at Silvana in Harlem from 6:00pm-8:00pm. 300 W 116th St (SW corner of 116th and Frederick Douglass Blvd). The First Person Plural Reading Series is hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Admission is free! There will be cake! Here is more information about our stellar readers:

Amanda Alcántara is a writer and journalist. She is the Digital Media Editor at Futuro Media Group. Her work centers on various themes including Caribbean culture, womanhood, borders and blackness. She has been published on Latino USA, Remezcla, Latino Voices and Black Voices on The Huffington Post, The Washington Post’s The Lily, BESE, and The San Francisco Chronicle. In May of 2017, Amanda obtained a Master of Arts from NYU in Latin American and Caribbean Studies where her thesis focused on the experience of women residing on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Amanda is also a Co-Founder and previous editor of La Galería Magazine. She has also been published in the anthology Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, published by Red Sugarcane Press. She has a BA from Rutgers University. A map of the world turned upside down hangs on her wall.

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess’ fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize.

Jacinda took her first Creative Writing classes at Harvard, where she received her BA, and then cross-registered to take more classes through the English Department at Duke University, where she received her JD. After practicing law for four years, she went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire. She recently finished a novel called James Loves Ruth. Jacinda is mom to two children, about whom she writes frequently.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of peoples of African descent throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including the Caribbean and Brazil. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017).

What Just Happened? Writers Respond to Our American Crises

Posted on November 8, 2018 by admin

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 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.

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.

Tanya 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.

Max 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”

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.

Ruby 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.

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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: Carina del Valle Schorske

Posted on December 5, 2017 by admin

FPP spoke with poet Carina del Valle Schorske via email about her grandmother’s railroad apartment, the coercive word known as “America”, her work on Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón, and so much more. Come to Silvana on Tuesday, December 5th, and hear Schorske read with Nicole Sealey, Victor LaValle, and Nandi Comer. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St., near Frederick Douglass Blvd, on the SW corner. Take the B/C to 116th and you’re there. 7pm.

Tell us about your Harlem. Harlem is in the corner of my eye. I can see it when I lean over the park with a cliff so sheer the grid couldn’t break its back. I walk back and forth across the park to bars and bookstores and the black archives of our extended Caribbean. To visit friends. I dance at the Shrine. My Columbia-subsidized studio drinks down its ration of blood.

My Harlem is Washington Heights and the railroad apartment where my grandmother has lived for more than sixty years at 156th and Broadway. The smell of her lobby is a wrinkle in time where I’m caught at the bottom of a pocket looking for the keys. I’m not invited to the parties that happened before I was born but I still spin the soundtrack.

My Harlem looks good in May when it’s wet and somehow I’m in love again. I’m late but he doesn’t mind. In my Harlem Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is out with her pop-up shop selling rare magazines that shine like mirrors.

Sometimes in my Harlem I hallucinate Helga Crane and we suck each other up like Quicksand. I’m quoting from that Harlem novel now: “She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way, a disturbing factor.”

In addition to your own poetry, you’ve done significant translation work. Will you share your personal joys and challenges of translating other poets?

I recently made a statement on the topic! If the statement were a tweet, it would be: “How else is anything born but through a foreign body?” Translation troubles the capitalist logic of ownership that governs so many aspects of global culture. To whom does a translation belong? Translation’s trouble is its joy and its challenge. Sometimes it’s straight up legal trouble: ask any translator who’s struggled to secure the “rights” to bring a poet into a new language across centuries, embargos, repressions, family traumas, redrawn borders, battle lines, colonial bylaws, crypto-currencies.

When do you feel most “we” and most “I”?

Tfw someone else’s “I” resonates so strongly with my own that a “we” gets born and then I have to learn how to care for it. Isn’t that what reading is? Recently I’ve been returning to a (Puschart Prize nomianted!) poem by my friend Sheila Maldonado called “Temporary Statement,” which begins as a kind of cantankerous refusal of the statement or manifesto form–so often written in the first person plural. She writes her statement in the first person singular. Here I want to quote her almost in full:

“…I’ve forgotten how to break a line. The line breaks me. I use I too much. I do get

that the I on the page is still not me. I do get that. I don’t know if you get that. I don’t

know who I am in this time. I have lost a great love. I am suffering through a terrible

leader. I don’t know where to turn or who to be. I am looking for my days to recquire

some rhythm. I can’t be kind in the morning. I can’t be kind. I am mourning. I miss

touch. I miss conversations I had in the past. I miss the conversation I had with my past.

It is leaving me. I don’t mind erasing. I want to know who to address though.”

Calling on Sheila to speak for me in a voice of profound doubt about the possibility of connection (even with something called the self) reveals how much we need each other even when we’re aiming to speak for ourselves. What actions do I have to take to protect the space that allows her–or anyone–to be someone I want to be a “we” with? Very soon we’re back to basics: food, shelter, the right to work and leisure and care.

But I’m very much a believer in “begin where you are” and most of the time I think of myself as an individual, even if that’s a modern delusion. So I begin with my “I” as a kind of technology for cutting through my own bullshit. “I” as a slender blade like in that Neil Young song (he’s still going!): “the love I got for you is a razor love that cuts clean through.” Maybe to a we. Vamos a ver.

A poem of yours, a poem of someone else’s that you wish all of America could hear right now. Why?

Honestly, I’m hung up on what “all of America” could possibly mean right now. Does that include Guantanamo? Guam? Everyone who’s crossed the border or is making plans to cross it right now? America Online? More pointedly for my own family, does that include Puerto Rico? Most of my cousins on the island would affirm the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans in a strategic bid for justice, especially in the wake of the hurricanes Irma & Maria. If we’re citizens, if we’re Americans, maybe FEMA will step up–that’s the logic. But if there’s a “we” that connects Puerto Rico and the mainland, El Salvador and California, Ismael Rivera and the Isley Brothers, I wouldn’t want to call it “America,” which has always seemed like a coercive word to me. It’s better in Latin America where they say it plural, Las Américas. I don’t know that there’s a single poem that can turn this imperial disaster into the right kind of “we.” But I’ve been listening to “Dime,” off of the classic Rubén Blades / Willie Colón salsa collab, Siembra, which came out in 1978. That’s New York, and one of the earliest album covers with babies on the cover way before Biggie:

The chorus asks, “Dime cómo me arranco del alma esta pena de amor” // “Tell me how I can pluck this pain of love from my soul.” But the song is so sweet, you want to stay in it. You don’t want to pluck it out. I guess for me the “America” question is, what would it mean to allow the pain of loving these plural places to form my soul? So my poem prescription is actually a song.

As for my own work, I’d probably direct you to an essay rather than a poem: an essay in which I ask how we bring migrant women–especially migrant women in Latin America–into the fold of U.S. literature as we translate them into English.

I realize now I’ve been answering your final question: “How has the natural and man-made disaster in Puerto Rico affected you and your work?” Answering it directly still feels too stark.

When Hurricane Maria hit, one of my cousins–we’ll call him my Tío José, because he’s that generation–was in the hospital. He was elderly and unwell. Last week, he passed away. The hurricane didn’t kill him but it certainly hastened his death. The last time I saw him was not this summer, but last, when he showed me the memoir he’d been writing for his daughter, and photographs of the farm where he was born. I want to honor the documentary impulse that sanctifies each bend in the river. That teaches me to trace its shape. When he showed me a map of the island he took my hand to point with his.

A solace these past few months has been the new connections with Puerto Ricans across the diaspora, especially Raquel Salas Rivera, who was already a friend, Erica Mena, and Ricardo Maldonado, who’ve let me help out as a translator and co-conspirator gathering and translating poems from contemporary Puerto Rican poets to print and sell as broadsides for hurricane relief. The project–Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón–will finally go live next week, just in time for the holiday season! Some of the poems included were written just days after Maria: that documentary impulse again. From the other side of a humanitarian flight off the island, Xavier Valcárcel writes, “Supongo que también las palomas tendrán que regresar al principio” // “I guess even the pigeons will have to go back to the beginning.”

FPP interview: Sonya Chung

Posted on May 6, 2017 by admin

Sonya Chung is a writer and teacher living in Harlem. FPP caught up with her to discuss her relationship to Harlem, her favorite spots in our neighborhood, and where and why she writes. We also talked about the “we” POV as “a fundamental world view in Korean culture.” Catch Sonya Chung alongside Terry Blackhawk, Alexander Chee, and Deborah Emin this Tuesday, May 9th, 7pm, at Shrine World Music Venue (at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell (7th Ave) between 133rd and 134th in Harlem).

You live in Harlem and teach in upstate New York. Where do you do most of your creative writing?

West Harlem / Morningside Heights is home—the first and only place I’ve ever felt truly at home. Like most New Yorkers, I think of my neighborhood as a micro-neighborhood that is essentially a 5-block radius; and I live at the cross-section of multiple neighborhoods, cultures, histories, racial groups, institutions, and social classes, which is exactly the sort of place where I always feel most comfortable and myself. I watch the neighborhood change, for better and for worse, daily; and I also witness the diverse groups and forces colliding and converging in endlessly interesting ways. All this to say that I get most of my real writing work done here, at my desk, which is in the kitchen of a small (studio) apartment I share with my partner and two doglets (here you can see a video of them, because you all need to watch this when you are feeling low or stressed and need a burst of endorphins). When I get itchy or need to breathe new air or my partner (who also works at home) needs to make a long work phone call, I walk—five blocks this way, 10 or 20 blocks that way—and I can be in a completely different world. Just yesterday I found a café run by a Venezuelan opera singer in lower Washington Heights, and I got good work done there. Sometimes I go to Joe Coffee at Columbia. I have to mention that I often get good work done at Silvana (while enjoying the best uptown falafel hands-down), which I know is connected to Shrine, where FPP is hosted.

What are some of your favorite spots in Harlem?

Oh, so many. I just mentioned Silvana. Kuro Kuma on Tiemann Place is the best coffee in the city—and I’m a big coffee person—so please everyone go there and keep them in business forever. Maison Harlem is our go-to for happy hour and special occasions. The church ladies outside the Baptist Church on 125th and St. Nich sell homemade coconut cake slices that will change your life (and probably save your soul). The best vegetable and fruit vendor (he’s from Bangladesh) is at the corner of St. Nich and 124th, and the Korean fish market on St. Nich/125 not only has good fish & chips but is one of the most interesting places, sociologically speaking, in the neighborhood. In Morningside Park we love the handball courts, where we smash tennis balls against the wall, racquetball-style, to de-stress. On long walks I love to stroll around City College and St. Nicholas Park, and up to the Trinity Church /Church of the Intercession Cemetery, which is amazing; and just a few blocks beyond that is Sister’s Uptown Bookstore, which has been there 17 years, and everyone should know about it.

What does the “we” point of view mean to you, and how does it enter your work?

I’ve never written in first person plural, strictly speaking; but I think about narrative POV constantly. I am not exaggerating when I say I think it is the most important decision a writer makes when writing fiction (when teaching, it is always the first topic I introduce to students, via James Wood’s How Fiction Works). There is not only the question of “which POV?”—first person (singular or plural), second person, third person (omniscient or limited)—but also narrative distance, reliability, consistency and/or shifts. When settling on a narrative POV(s), you are essentially determining the work’s “aboutness.” If you are writing from the “we” POV, or, say, the second person, this is especially evident. Or if your narrator is unreliable, this is not simply a “formal” decision but rather a driving force of content/meaning as well. Finding the right POV for your fiction is often, necessarily, a trial-and-error process; it happens simultaneously as your story and characters find their own aboutness. Form and content shape each other.

The “we” POV is in fact a fundamental world view in Korean culture: in the Korean language, it is a grammatical rule that one must say “our” house, “our” mother/father/grandmother, etc., “our” church; there are other words for which this is the case (money? I’m not sure, but that would make sense), but these are the ones that come to mind. The communal-vs-individual tension is always, always pressing for me—in life and in art. If there is a way in which I feel my soul-level Westernness, it is in this tension—my natural (while at the same time conflicted) leaning toward individual liberty/identity over communal obligation/conformity. The characters in both my novels struggle with all this as well. They are shaped by and beholden to their family cultures, while at the same time deeply, conspicuously at odds with them. The I/We tension is endlessly difficult and interesting. I seem to have thus far coped by writing ensemble casts. I have yet to be able to write a novel featuring a sole protagonist. The novel I’m working on now does feature a single protagonist, and I am writing her in first person; and frankly I’m having a heck of a time with it!

At a recent reading Teju Cole, another New York-based writer, said he started writing because it was “a way to be intense about my life.” Is writing for you a way to be intense about your life, or is it a way to escape from your life, or something else? In sum, why do you write?

Writing is definitely a way to be intense about my life. All throughout my adolescence I was told that I was “too serious,” and finally when I found my vocation as a writer, I was allowed to immerse in that seriousness. In life we live on the surfaces and interact via simplifications, and that can be enjoyable and entertaining and nourishing in various ways; but in books we plunge deep into complexity and the real. Life has always felt unsatisfyingly fragmented to me; in novels we aim for something like wholeness. If I didn’t have writing, I think I might have (more) serious mental health issues, because the gap between the call of reality and how we live day-to-day would trouble me a lot. In that sense I suppose writing is both intensity and escape.

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The Grand Finale of the FPP Season – Sunday, March 9 at Silvana in Harlem!

Posted on February 11, 2014 by admin

Please join us for an afternoon of arts both literary and theatrical in the downstairs performance space of Silvana in Harlem at 4:00pm on March 9, 2014. We will begin with a staged reading of Karinne Keithley Syers’ My Address Is Still Walton: A Play For The Set of Charlie Rose, directed and performed by Johanna McKeon, Caleb Bark, and Lacy Post, then we will hear poetry and prose writers Nicole Cooley and Randall Horton. For this season finale, we will be in a new space, at the relatively new Silvana cafe and bar at 116th and FDB, across from Harlem Tavern. Plan to eat delicious Israeli food and drink whatever suits! As always, admission is free.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and now lives outside of NYC. She has published four books of poems, most recently Breach(LSU Press) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books), both in 2010, and a novel. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Feminist Wire, The Nation, and Poetry among other venues. She is currently working on a non-fiction book, My Dollhouse, Myself: Miniature Histories, as well as a new collection of poems, Of Marriage. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York.

Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award and most recently a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Randall is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a member of The Symphony: The House that Etheridge Built. Randall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven. An excerpt from his memoir titled Roxbury is published by Kattywompus Press. Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press in the publisher of his latest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy. He currently lives in NYC.

Karinne Keithley Syers is an interdisciplinary artist and publisher of plays and performance texts. Her work spans dance, writing, sound, animation, essay, video, and projection, and has been seen in and out of New York since 1995. Recently her solo show Another Tree Dance premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City after a workshop performance at Mount Tremper Arts. Her chamber operetta/museum installation Montgomery Park, or Opulence, won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2011, after its 2010 run at Incubator Arts Project. Her work has also been seen at Danspace Project, Dixon Place, La MaMa E.T.C., Tonic, innumerable installations of Catch, several Little Theaters, The Ohio Theater’s Ice Factory festival, Surf Reality, and Ur, and has been supported by residencies and workshops at the MacDowell Colony, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Puppet Lab, Silo, and Mount Tremper Arts. She has collaborated as a performer with David Neumann, Young Jean Lee, Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, Chris Yon, Sara Smith, Melanie Rios Glaser, Paul Matteson, and Yoshiko Chuma, as a sound and video designer with Big Dance Theater, Sibyl Kempson, Kate Weare, Ivy Baldwin, Chris Yon, Melanie Rios Glaser, Monica Bill Barnes, as a choreographer with The Civilians, Talking Band, Johanna McKeon, and Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, with whom she has also been a librettist. She founded 53rd State Press in 2007, and now co-edits it with Antje Oegel. They recently published their 19th book of performance scripts. She studied the dark (playwriting) arts at Brooklyn College with Mac Wellman, and is spitting distance from completing her Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her long-running audio serial The Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal can be found on fancystitchmachine.org, along with her treasury of ukulele covers and stop motion animations.

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