Tonya Foster Reading at SEA

Photograph by Erica Kaufman

TONYA FOSTER

Tuesday, June14th

7-9pm

(in conjunction with the SEA exhibition Contemporary Slavery)

Suggested Donation: $5. Cash bar.

EXIT ART, 475 10th Avenue (between 36th and 37th Street), NYC

The SEA Poetry Series emphasizes diverse ways in which poets address social and environmental issues in their work. Presented in connection with specific SEA exhibitions, the series aims to investigate and expand the exhibition theme through the lens of contemporary poetry. After each reading, an artist from the exhibition or a community member working within the exhibition theme briefly responds to the poet. Past poets in the series have included Jonathan Skinner, Marcella Durand, Laura Elrick, James Sherry, Julie Ezelle Patton, Ed Menchavez, Phil Metres, and Michael Leong.

Panelists responding to Tonya Foster's work are photographer Jesse Pesta, whose photographs are featured in the Contemporary Slavery exhibit at EXIT ART, and Professor Salamishah Tillet.

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A recipient of a number of fellowships, notably from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and City University of New York, Foster teaches at Bard College. A native of New Orleans, she writes and resides in Brooklyn.

Salamishah Tillet is an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization in 2007 and A.M. in English from Harvard University and her M.A.T. from Brown University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania where she received her B.A. in English and Afro-American Studies. She is a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow for Career Enhancement and is currently a visiting fellow at the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book Peculiar Citizenship: Slavery and the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (forthcoming Duke University Press) examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals reimagine slavery as a metaphor for post-Civil Rights citizenship and as a model for racial democracy. With Hua Hsu, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming, The Day that Martin Died: Music, Memory, and Martin Luther King, Jr. She is an associate editor of Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. She recently co-edited the Callaloo Special Issue on Ethiopia and has published in Callaloo, Novel, Research in African Literatures, and Women Review of Books. She is currently working on a book-length project on the civil rights icon, Nina Simone. She is also the co-founder of the gender violence prevention and expressive arts organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., and a regular contributor to the online magazine, The Root. Her research interests include twentieth-century African-American literature, film, and popular music, cultural studies, and feminism.

Jesse Pesta is a writer and photographer and a Page One editor at The Wall Street Journal.

He has lived and worked as a journalist in New York, India, Hong Kong and small-town America, where his family published a more-than-century-old local newspaper.

SEA Poetry Series support provided by Poets and Writers Inc.

Michael Leong & Phil Metres Reading at SEA, 2/1/11

MICHAEL LEONG & PHIL METRES

Tuesday, February 1st

7-9pm

(in conjunction with the SEA Exhibit entitled FRACKING)

$5 suggested donation. Cash Bar.

EXIT ART, 475 10th Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), NYC

Michael Leong and Phil Metres will be reading their poems from the FRACKING exhibit along with other pieces, followed by a response from, and panel with, artist Jacques del Conte. There will be time for the audience to ask questions and get involved in the discussion. Please plan to hang out in the bar following the formal presentation.

Michael Leong is the author of two books of poetry: e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions / The Brooklyn Rail, forthcoming). He's also written a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All(BlazeVOX [books], 2009), and several chapbooks and broadsides including The Great Archivist's / Cloudy Quotient (Beard of Bees Press, 2010), Midnight's Marsupium (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010), and The Lung of the Poet (Splitleaves Press, 2011). He lives in New York City and contributes to the literary blog Big Other.

Philip Metres is the author of To See the Earth (2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (translation, 2004), and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (translation, 2003). He has also published two chapbooks, Instants (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006) and Primer for Non-Native Speakers (Wick Poetry Series, 2004), and has three forthcoming in 2011: abu ghraib arias, Ode to Oil, and Thirty-Five New Pages. His work has appeared inBest American Poetry, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry and has garnered an NEA, a Watson Fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council Grants, and the Cleveland Arts Prize in 2010. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information on his poetry, click here.

Julie Patton Reading at SEA, 8/24/10

JULIE EZELLE PATTON

Tuesday, August 24th

7-9pm

(in conjunction with the SEA Exhibit entitled CONSUME)

$5 suggested donation. Cash Bar.

EXIT ART, 475 10th Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), NYC

Julie Ezelle Patton will be reading, followed by a reading/panel with local food activists, including James Subudhi, Environmental Policy and Advocacy Coordinator, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Inc. (WE ACT), Ed Menchavez, and others to be announced. There will be time for the audience to ask questions and get involved in the discussion. Please plan to hang out in the bar following the formal presentation.

Julie Ezelle Patton is the author of Using Blue To Get Black, Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake, and A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?). Julie’s work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)), Critiphoria, and nocturnes. "Room for Opal,” a sound/text installation that Julie created as a Green Horizons Fellow at Bates College, is lovingly explored in Jonathan Skinner’s “Listening with Patton” (ON: Contemporary Practice, 2008). Julie’s performance work, featured at the Stone, Jazz Standard, and noted international venues, emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and other worldy chora-graphs. She has shape-shifted into a cat-witch for Sop Doll: A Jack Tale Noh (written by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn), Desdemona in Othello Syndrome (Uri Caine’s 2009 Grammy nominated CD), a ring-tone (Ravi Coltrane’s At Night), and “Onyx Blackly’s” voice of doom for Barnaby McAll’s Triplum. Her publik dissertation, “Chateau in z’ Ghetto,” is an ArkiTextual dwelling space foregrounding creative utilitarian projects, ill-literacy, ritual maintenance work, neighborhood love-economies, and the familial philosophy of “Making Do” in the urban desert of Cleveland, Ohio. The writing of this “home-ek” project is exhibited, litter-ally and artifactually, in its own Salon des Refusés. Spin-offs of this season-based (unreel) reality show reflect Julie’s practice as a native plant and green space advocate (“Let It Bee Gardens,” “Rockefeller Park Project,” “Poet Tree Mitigation Works”), market gardener (“Sun Raw”) and eco/arts educator (“Old School”). Julie is a recipient of an Acadia Arts Foundation Grant (2008), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship (2007). Julie has taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art, Naropa, Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Schule fur Dichtung (Vienna, Austria). She lives in the “East Pillage” of New York City.

James Sherry Reading at SEA

JAMES SHERRY

Tuesday, July 27th

7-9pm

(in conjunction with the SEA Exhibit entitled ECOAESTHETIC)

$5 suggested donation. Cash Bar.

EXIT ART, 475 10th Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), NYC

James Sherry will read the essay, "Climate Change and Poetry" and the poem "Passive Voice: Forcing Amaryllis."

Following the reading, The Canary Project, the photographer Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris, whose work is featured in ECOAESTHETIC, will respond to the reading. There will be time for the audience to ask questions and get involved in the discussion. Please plan to hang out in the bar following the formal presentation.

James Sherry is the author of 10 books of poetry and criticism. His work on Environmental Poetics, both prose and poetry, is widely published in magazines and websites. He is the editor of Roof Books and founder of the Segue Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris work with photography, video, writing and installation. Of primary concern are contemporary efforts to develop ecological consciousness and the possibilities for art within a social activist praxis. In 2006 they co-founded The Canary Project - a collaborative that produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change (www.canary-project.org). Works from The Canary Project have shown in diverse venues, including: art museums such as The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver and the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY); science museums such as the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago, IL); universities; public art projects; magazines; city halls; etc. In 2008-2009 Sayler and Morris were Loeb Fellows at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. They are currently teaching in the Transmedia Department at Syracuse University.

Laura Elrick's STALK on Thursday, December 10, 2009

LAURA ELRICK

Thursday, December 10, 2009

7:30-9:00pm

EXIT ART, 475 10th Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), NYC

FREE

Laura Elrick will do a live poetic reading for her film Stalk.

Following the reading, there will be a panel response from Elrick; Jess Levey, artist in the SEA exhibition America for Sale; and Adam Simon, a Brooklyn-based artist and the founder of alternative "space" Four Walls and the FineArt Adoption Network.

Laura Elrick’s latest project Stalk is a critical outgrowth of the spatially investigative social poetics she gestures toward in her essay “Poetry, Ecology and the Reappropriation of Lived Space”. Originally commissioned by the Kootenay School of Writing for the Positions Colloquium held in Vancouver in August 2008, Stalk documents a silent public performance (part dystopian urban cartography, part spatial-poetic intervention) over which Elrick intones poetry and song constructed from appropriated text. She has previously written two books of poetry—sKincerity (Krupskaya 2003) and Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005)—and has also recorded a set of audio pieces originally created for the Performance Writing Series at New Langton Arts in San Francisco (accessible on writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/). She has been a contributing editor to Future Poem Books, curator of the Segue on the Bowery reading series, and a frequent contributor to poetics journals in New York and elsewhere. She works at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Marcella Durand LIVE at EXIT ART!!

photo credit: John Sarsgard

MARCELLA DURAND

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

7:30 - 9:00pm

EXIT ART, 475 10th Avenue (between 36th & 37th Streets), NYC

FREE 

Marcella Durand will read a selection of her poems and present a talk on in conjunction with the SEA exhibition, The End of Oil. 

Durand’s recent books are Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem, 2008), AREA (Belladonna, 2008), and The Anatomy of Oil (Belladonna, 2005). Other books include Western Capital Rhapsodies, City of Ports, and Lapsus Linguae. Her poems and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, Chain, The Poker, Verse, NYFA Current, and other journals. She has given talks on the intersections of poetry and ecology at Kelly Writers House, Small Press Traffic, Dactyl Foundation, Stella Adler Studio of Acting, and other venues. Excerpts from her ongoing collaboration with Tina Darragh, based on environmental science, Deep Ecology and Francis Ponge, have appeared in Anomaly, How(2), and Ecopoetics. She was a writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2006, and in 2005 organized a reading and panel on the inter-relations between astronomy and poetry as part of the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena Conference at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Currently, she is translating Michèle Métail’s Les horizons du sol/Earth’s Horizons, a history of the geological formation of Marseille written within a Oulipian formal constraint; a section of her translation appeared last year in The Nation. She lives in New York City’s East Village with her husband Richard O’Russa and son Ismael Toussaint Durand O’Russa. 

Marcella Durand is 2009 Poetry Artist Fellowship recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).  This reading is co-sponsored by Artists and Audiences Exchange, a NYFA public program.