Tag Archives: Terry Blackhawk

Announcing the First Person Plural Season Finale: Tuesday, May 9th!

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New York City is warming up: join the First Person Plural collective and Shrine bar in Harlem for the final reading in our 2016-2017 showcase, and let our literary heat carry you through to summer! Tuesday May 9th, 7:00pm, will feature readings by Terry Blackhawk, Alexander Chee, Sonya Chung and Deborah Emin.

Shrine is located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell (7th Ave) between 133rd and 134th in Harlem.  By subway: 2/3 to 135th, or B/C to 135th.  As always, admission is free.

TerryBlackhawkA former Detroit high school teacher, Terry Blackhawk founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project in 1995 in order to encourage children and youth in Detroit classrooms to “think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wider world.” She is the author of three chapbooks and four full-length collections of poetry including Escape Artist (BkMk Press), winner of the John Ciardi Prize, and The Light Between, from WSU Press. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and on line at sites such a Verse Daily, Solstice and The Collagist. She was twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year through the Michigan Youth Arts Festival. Other awards include the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize from Nimrod International, a Michigan Governor’s Award for Arts Education, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Michigan Council for the Arts. Blackhawk holds an honorary doctorate as well as a Ph.D. from Oakland University. She is a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow and blogs for the Detroit Huffington Post.

Photo by M. SharkeyAlexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at VQR, and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in Best American Essays 2016, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. His first collection of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018.

Photo credit: M. Sharkley

Sonya Chung is the author of the novels The Loved Ones (Relegation Books, 2016)—
SonyaChung_Headshot_12x300selected for Kirkus Best Fiction 2016, Library Journal Best Indie Fiction, Indie Next List, TNB Book Club, and Buzzfeed Books Recommends—and Long for This World (Scribner, 2010). She is a staff writer for The Millions and founding editor of Bloom—a community and literary site that highlights the work of authors who debut after the age of 40—and is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts Writers’ Residency, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Key West Literary Seminars residency. Sonya’s stories, reviews, & essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Tin House, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, Short: An International Anthology, and forthcoming in the anthology Wherever I’m With You (Seal Press), among others. Sonya has taught fiction writing at Columbia University, NYU, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and College of Mount St. Vincent. Currently she lives in New York City and teaches at Skidmore College. Sonya was born in Washington, DC, and has lived in Seattle and New England.  She loves wandering urban streets, growing vegetables, dogs, Paris, bourbon, good TV, cigars, audiobooks, three-minute poached eggs, baking, boots, motorcycles, and kindness.  She is passionately DIY, an introvert, and prefers small living spaces to large ones.

Photo credit: Robin Holland/robinholland.com

Deborah Emin-headshotDeborah Emin is the founder/publisher of Sullivan Street Press which she began in order to help bring the publishing industry into a more supportive relationship with our environment. She also began the company in order to protect her own intellectual property (that is, her first novel, Scags at 7, which had been pulped in the course of its first publisher going bankrupt). Deborah is completing the final volume of this Scags Series in 2018 with the publication of Scags at 45, which brings the number of novels in the series to four. Not able to let go of her character, Scags, Deborah is creating a brand new set of novels that are political thrillers, written by her character, Scags Morgenstern, with the first one, Born Loser, Born Lucky, due out in early 2018 as well. Besides working in the publishing field, she has also worked as a creative writing teacher, primarily for Gotham Writers Workshop, as a writer for Gay City News and Thrive, as a political blogger for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign and has volunteered for City Harvest, the Bowery Rescue Committee, the Richmond Hill Library and has run a reading series in her neighborhood of Queens for a number of years. Deborah is married to Suzanne Pyrch and with her, she travels every summer all over the country. In addition to car camping, they run the Itinerant Book Show, a meet and greet with bookstores and libraries along the routes they follow.

The First Person Plural Season Finale takes place on Tuesday, May 9th 2017, 7:00pm, at Shrine World Music Venue, 2271 Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem, NYC.

Find us on Twitter here, @fppharlem, on Instagram here, @fppharlem, and on Facebook here, First Person Plural Reading Series—Harlem,

Personal Draw

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I feel lucky.  This summer, the book stack next to me is more than “assigned” reading: they are the works of beloved mentors, or of subjects that are close to me, figuratively and literally.

First in line is The Killing Jar by Gloria Nixon-John and Robert Skip Noelker, based on the true story of one of the youngest Americans to be charged with murder and sentenced to death.  I am not usually a true crime reader (unless you count political coverage), but the authors go deep on the story of this rural Kentucky boy’s upbringing, and the harms he suffered before turning the violence outwards.  They also examine the community’s role, or, culpability, at every tragic turn.  Gloria is a deeply inspiring teacher of mine, and I’m glad she is getting this story told.

Next: Terry Blackhawk’s book of poems The Light Between.  I’ve known and admired Terry for many years now, having worked for her Detroit literary arts nonprofit InsideOut and having read her previous books.  This book—which Pete Markus hails as her best—is about the death of a marriage, and the resilience, and the rebirth, of the poet.  Such a feeling to hold in my hands the artful results of this traumatic yet blessed time in my friend’s life.

Next: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward.  I’m excited to read this National Book Award-winning novel because it’s a “Katrina novel”, yes, but more so because it’s a family, coming-of-age narrative told from the POV of a young black woman on the Mississippi side of the storm.  Continued personal draw: I work on a Katrina oral history project.  I am looking forward to taking in Ward’s insights, and witnessing the aftermath through new eyes.

Turning to art: Yourself in the World: Selected Writings and Interviews by Glenn Ligon, edited by Scott Rothkopf.  I still think often of the recent Ligon Whitney show, and I see his “Give Us a Poem” sculpture whenever I pass the Studio Museum, for it is visible from the street.  I flipped through this book Harlem Flo’s gift shop and thought, I want to know more about Ligon.  So I’m reading.

Finally, turning around (literally) to Rice High School—or, the building that housed it—that stands behind my apartment.  This Catholic high school closed down last year.  Yet, I’m mesmerized by this building that keeps its lights on all night long—or at least enough of them to create a moody nighttime checkerboard. I stand in my kitchen and stare into floor after floor of windows and I wonder about the history, the ghosts.  So I ordered: The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem by Patrick J. McCloskey.  Word is, a new charter school is going to take over the building.  But before that happens, I will learn about the highs, and maybe the lows, of this once great institution.

–Stacy Parker LeMelle