Red Rover Series{readings that play with reading}
Experiment #51:
X-Ref = Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1st
5pm / doors lock 5:30pm
**please note change from usual time**
Featuring:
Samiya Bashir
Tisa Bryant
Gabrielle Civil
Carina Gia Farrero
Krista Franklin
A. Naomi Jackson
John Keene
at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
suggested donation $4
logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT was founded in 2006, and is edited and published by Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis and Kate Schatz. The Encyclopedia Project is a hybrid publication that plays with the reference book, literary journal and arts catalogue, blending all into a hybrid series of cross-referenced hardcover volumes. Each book complicates categorical, genre and narrative expectations, while connecting seemingly disparate writers, artists and ideas within and among volumes. Encyclopedia Vol. 1 A-E was published to wide acclaim in 2006; Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K just launched new excitement in 2010. http://www.encyclopediaproject.org
SAMIYA BASHIR is the author of Gospel, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award, and Where the Apple Falls, a Poetry Foundation bestseller and finalist for the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. Bashir is editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. Bashir’s poetry, stories, articles and editorial work have been featured in numerous publications and granted several awards. For over a decade, Bashir worked as a social justice communications professional and was a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, a writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Most recently, she was owner and principal consultant of Lead Time Consulting, specializing in communications for non-profits and arts organizations. She currently lives amidst the Ann Arbor trees beneath which she teaches writing at the University of Michigan.
TISA BRYANT is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor/founder of The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor (with Ernest Hardy) of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and nominated for a LAMBDA Literary Award. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the journals 1913, Animal Shelter, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, Viz., in the ‘zine, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson, and the solo exhibits of visual artists Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. A novel, The Curator, is forthcoming. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts
GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black woman poet, conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. Over the last ten years, she has premiered over twenty original performance works nationally (Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC) and internationally (Mexico, Puerto Rico, The Gambia).She is currently disseminating work from her 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellowship project “In and Out of Place: Making Black Feminist Performance Art in Mexico” and is circulating Swallow the Fish, her critical/creative text on race, body and performance art. She teaches at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN. The aim of all her work is to open up space.
CARINA GIA FARRERO, writer and interdisciplinary performer, received her BA from U.C. Berkeley, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a professor at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago. Her poems were most recently published or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Arsenic Lobster, The Encyclopedia Project and Windy City Queer.
KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, OH who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K and Gathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars, and a teaching artist for Young Chicago Authors, Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and numerous organizations in the city of Chicago.
A. NAOMI JACKSON was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in Coon Bidness, Encyclopedia, Obsidian, The Caribbean Writer, Sable, and Does Your Mama Know: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing. She has been a resident at Hedgebrook and received the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center. She co-founded the Tongues Afire creative writing workshop in 2006 and is a current student in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
JOHN KEENE is a writer, translator and Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He has a B.A. from Harvard and an M.F.A. from New York University. He was a longtime member of the Dark Room Collective, an organization that from 1988 to 1998 celebrated and gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color. His first novel, Annotations, was published by New Directions in 1995. A new collection of poems entitled Seismosis, in collaboration with Christopher Stackkhouse, was published by 1913 Press in 2006.
THE CHICAGO CALLING ARTS FESTIVAL presents multi-disciplinary collaborations during Chicago Artists Month and collaborated with Red Rover Series on Experiment #51. For the 6th Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival, people in the Chicago area will work with others outside of Chicago — both in the U.S. and abroad; these collaborations include a range of art forms, such as music, dance, film, literature, and intermedia — prepared or improvised. http://www.chicagocalling.org
RED ROVER SERIES is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.
Email ideas for reading experiments
to us at redroverseries@yahoogroups.com
The schedule for events is listed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries
