Writing Activism

culturally and politically informed affairs, events & writing

[writingactivism]

[writingactivism]

Pratt's Women Writers of Color Reading Room and the Pratt MFA in Writing would be honored by your presence at an evening of readings and discussion featuring 2015 Pulitzer Prize Winner Greg Pardlo, Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, and Poet/Photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Thursday, February 4th, 7pm. Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd Floor. This event is free and open to the public.

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Join the Pratt MFA Writing Activism series this coming Wednesday in the Women Writers of Color Reading Room for a reading & conversation with LaShonda Katrice Barnett. This event is free and open to the public. Wednesday, February 3rd, 12-2pm. Women Writers of Color Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd Floor. Kansas City native LaShonda Katrice Barnett grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. Editor of I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007), and Off The Record: Conversations With African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (2015), and author of the story collection Callaloo (1999). Barnett is a graduate of the University of Missouri, Sarah Lawrence College, and the College of William and Mary, where she earned a B.A., M.A. in Women's History and the Ph.D. in American Studies, respectively. Her debut novel, Jam on the Vine, courses a woman's launch of a black newspaper in the Jim Crow Midwest.

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The 28th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival features 19 screenings (mostly shorts and a few feature films), plus 13 installations, performances and DJs each night and a comfortable hang-out space to lounge and linger. Below is a listing of events to follow the last screening of each evening. Please send invites to friends who may be interested in coming! Keep in mind we're in a semi-residental area this year. We ask that you keep any outdoor usage and volume to a minimum so everyone can continue to enjoy the space we create this year! Find a complete listing of screenings at mixnyc.org and at: https://www.facebook.com/events/435116670022286/ ✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺ TUE, NOV 10 - OPENING NIGHT - 7pm Suzie Hart feat. Eddie Menendez & Rify Royalty https://www.facebook.com/events/1701557613406860/ - 9pm Progression & MOLT WED, NOV 11@ 11pm - $5 Suggested Donation - MC: Drae Campbell - DJs: D. BattyJack & Raq City - Performers: Winnie Superhova & BloodFlames RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/1851834701727586 THU, NOV 12 @ Midnight - $5 Suggested Donation - DJs: BeBe, Tygapaw, Chicklet & Mister Wallace - Performer: Mister Wallace FRI, NOV 13 @ Midnight - $5 Suggested Donation - DJs: Hertz van Rental, Average Jo, Sissy Elliott & Econ - Performers: Eduardo Restrepo & Eames Armstrong - Installation Performance: Suzie Hart - Host/Fashions: Lactic RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/1641471842760597/ SAT, NOV 14 @ 1am - $10 Suggested Donation - MC: Charlene - DJs: Horrorchata, Adam R, Amber Valentine & David Sokolowski - Performers: Madge of Honor, Xray Aims, Bunny Michael & Rify Royalty - Installation Performance: Suzie Hart, Onehalf Nelson, Erickatoure Aviance, Eddie Menendez & Manifestany Squirtz SUN, NOV 15 - CLOSING NIGHT - Performance: Blkbx Blkbx at 9pm ✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺ MIX NYC's venue is located in Sunset Park, off the 25th St R at: 155 26th Street (at 3rd Avenue) Brooklyn NY 11232 From Bushwick: B54 -> R at Jay St -> 25th St B38 -> R at Dekalb -> 25th St B52 -> R at Barclays -> 25th St From Williamsburg G train toward Church ave -> 4th ave 9th st -> Bay Ridge-bound R -> 25th St From Bed-Stuy A/C toward Manhattan -> Jay St to Bay Ridge R -> 25th St From Crown Heights 2/3 -> Atlantic/Barclays, transfer to Bay Ridge-Bound R -> 25th St From Bronx 2/3 or 4/5 -> Atlantic/Barclays, transfer to Bay Ridge-Bound R -> 25th St From LIC G toward Church ave -> Jay St, transfer to Bay Ridge R -> 25th St ✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺✺ * Check out our website for the full program and to purchase tickets to the film screening: www.mixnyc.org * Accessibility information can be found on our website: http://www.mixnyc.org/2015/accessibility-hoh-information/ * See the full list of MIX 2015 facebook events: https://www.facebook.com/mixnyc/events * Want to be part of the MIX family? Sign up to volunteer: http://t.co/gDoH4DxNvl * In order to support a safer festival experience for everyone, MIX will be offering an R&R space as well as a safer sex and harm reduction advocacy table in the space this year. If you experience or witness any safety or health concerns at the festival just look for a volunteer with a pink armband or our safer spaces table next to the hospitality desk.

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Tomorrow Jasmine Gibson will be reading (Thursday November 5th) from 2-4 in North Hall, Room 307.  Jasmine Gibson is an amazing young poet whose chapbook Drapetomania was just published by Commune Editions.

You can down download it here: http://communeeditions.com/drapetomania/

A link to other work is here: http://www.maskmagazine.com/…/psychosis-and-state-repression

Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn now living in Brooklyn and soon to be psychotherapist for all your gooey psychotic episodes that match the bipolar flows of capital. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire and freedom. She has written for Mask Magazine and LIES Vol II: Journal of Materialist feminism and has now published a chapbook, Drapetomania, off of Commune Editions.

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This is today! Bring your lunch! All are welcome!

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Eileen Myles: Launch of I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 and Reissue of Chelsea Girls

With Sam Ace, Jen Benka, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Boyer, Alex Chee, Cathy de la Cruz, r. erica doyle, Megan Fernandez, Adam Fitzgerald, Emily Gould, Patricia Spears Jones, erica kaufman, Porochista Khapour, Ben Lerner, Nate Lippens, Elinor Nauen, Trace Peterson, Ariana Reines, Jill Soloway, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Waldman, Joe Westmoreland, and Simone White.  Hosted by Nicole J. Georges, K8 Hardy, and Morgan Parker. Eileen Myles was born in Boston (1949) and she moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Educated at the poetry project by Violi, Notley, Berrigan & Zavatsky, Myles is the author of 19 books including new & selected poems I Must Be Living Twice & Chelsea Girls,  Snowflake/different streets (poems, 2012) and Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010). She’s a Guggenheim fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. This event will be cash only.  Admission is $8 at the door, $7 for students and seniors, and $5 or free for members.

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Pratt MFA Writing and Activism Series welcomes Antena!!

Please join us for a presentation and discussion of work by Antena, a language justice and literary experimentation collaborative founded by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, both writers, artists, literary translators, bookmakers, and activist interpreters. Antena activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit.   Wednesday, October 7 12:30 PM Film/Video Screening Room, 550 Myrtle Avenue Presented by the Pratt MFA in Writing     More Information:   Antena has exhibited, published, performed, organized, advocated, translated, curated, interpreted, and/or instigated with numerous groups and institutions, including Blaffer Art Museum, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, and Project Row Houses. More info: http://antenaantena.org/.   Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, and urban cyclist. Her most recent translation is Intervenir/Intervene by Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Her poetry books have been published by Atelos, Palm Press, and subpress, and in numerous DIY/DIT editions. Her translations and writings are forthcoming from Kenning Editions, Litmus Press, and Writ Large Press. She teaches at CalArts and Otis College, and organizes bilingual spaces locally through Antena Los Ángeles: www.antenalosangeles.org.   John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, and translator. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Antígona González (Les Figues Press, forthcoming) and Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012). His most recent chapbooks are Killing Current (Mouthfeel Press, 2012) and Ioyaiene (Handmade for Fresh Arts Houston-based Community Supported Art Program, 2014). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, is forthcoming in 2016 from Noemi Press.

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Free Mentor, Teacher, Educator & Community Activist Training this weekend @ NYUI'll be presenting on Friday Night (as a part of Black Poets Speak Out) as well as facilitating a teaching artists workshop on Saturday (Workshopping the Workshop) w/Brooklyn College MFA Candidate & Performance Poet: Jon Sands. Full lineup of the event and flyer below. It's gonna be amazing! Hope you an make it.

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Pratt MFA in Writing Responds to New York Times Journalist

Dear Cecilia Capuzzi Simon:

Thank you for your article "Why Writers Love to Hate the M.F.A." (April 9, 2015). The essay does an excellent job at mapping out the terrain of the MFA industry. We’re grateful that you mentioned our very new program, however there are several aspects to our program that set us apart from both your general view of--and history of--MFA programs, and nearly all other MFA programs mentioned in your piece.

In developing the Pratt MFA we completely discarded the Iowa model of the workshop--i.e. not all existing MFAs are built around the workshop, as your article states--in favor of a model of critique and community that questions the notion of a unique, solitary, transcendent writer.

Our collective crit sessions are collaborative, multi-genre, and non-hierarchical. All students working in all genres and media meet in one large 4hr+ class, along with numerous faculty members from various genres and disciplines and (crucially) activist backgrounds.  We support a writing practice that moves back and forth between creative work and direct action, organizing and journalism, poetry and protest; last week, one student presented and led a discussion on her work in creating #BlackPoetSpeakOut, with related direct action letter writing material and related teaching modules for the #BlackPoetSpeakOut campaign, as well as her poems, which extend from and amplify these lines of engagement.

Our students are not silent. They present and lead the discussion of their work to the whole gathering, with minimal faculty guidance. Our antecedents, rather than Iowa, are Black Mountain College, Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the Whitney Independent Study Program, Evergreen College, the (former) Jan Van Eyck Academie (Holland), Michael Asher’s infamous crit class at Cal Arts, and Bard’s Interdisciplinary MFA.

Programmatically we veer away from genre. We understand ‘work’ to mean that which is on and beyond the page. Students are welcome to crit community engagements, media work, performance, traditional stories, essays, and poems on the page. While there are no specific tracks of study, as your article misstates, specific and individual support is provided through a strong mentorship component, and in the second year writers design and complete a fieldwork residency, which is carried out in collaboration with an existing grassroots activist organization (students are also invited to create their own organizations--to build structures of engagement that are necessary but don’t yet exist). Implicit here is a reframing of authorship: what world do we want to create, to live in? How do you position yourself in this world? How do you become a producer of culture without abandoning the world and contexts that support your writing?

So far, in less than one year, several projects have come out of the program, including a series called Shirley that invites community activists and collectives to present work and actions alongside poetry readings, and Women Writers of Color (WWOC), a project run by a student collective that creates anti-racism workshops and literary events  that “foster interests and further understanding of the accomplishments of women writers of color....”

The Pratt MFA in Writing aims to support activist and engaged writers in all ways of making a life and a writing practice in these times. We proceed with a foundational premise of radical cultural, racial, intellectual and aesthetic multiplicity. We seek to make an institutional program that is itself a form of institutional critique while also being porous and unfixed and intersecting with the world both off-campus and beyond the literary MFA.

Christian Hawkey and Rachel Levitsky, with the MFA Core Faculty

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Cecilia Vicuña on freedom, healing, and teaching at Pratt

Cecilia Vicuña spoke to the Pratt MFA in Writing and Activism's class Multilingualisms: Translation and/as Composition on April 7th, 2015. In this segment sh...

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https://www.facebook.com/events/355291124595398/

This past month Akai Gurley organizers launched an Indiegogo Campaign. This is a fund setup to support the household survived by Akai Gurley; which includes his widow Kimberly Ballinger, his 2 year old princess Akaila Gurley and her big sister Kamiya who is 5. Despite the fact Akai Gurley was murdered by the NYPD, the family has yet to receive reparations, therefore the community needs to step-it-up and support them.

https://life.indiegogo.com/fundraisers/in-memory-of-akai-gurley-and-his-family

Students and faculty in The Pratt Institute MFA in Writing program, along with Ty Blizzy Black (Akai Gurley organizer) are working together to host a benefit reading on behalf of his surviving family and to raise awareness around their struggle. All proceeds raised at the benefit will go directly to the Indiegogo campaign and we hope the event inspires people to go out and help spread the word about this injustice. 7pm. Sunday. February 15th. $5-$25 suggested donation. No one turned away. The Spectrum | 59 Montrose ave., Brooklyn, NY | Between Lorimer and Leonard in Williamsburg | G or J train to Broadway and Lorimer or take the L to the Montrose Stop. The B48 bus also runs nearby. Readings and Performances: Pamela Sneed, Jack Waters, Stacy Szymaszek, Jackie Wang, Mahogany L. Browne, Ariana Reines, Erica Hunt, Ty Blizzy Black, Her-She Nebula, Sarah Gambito, Aurora Rose Barnes, Ras Osagyefo, To Whom It May Concern, Falu, Roya Marsh, Katherine George, Jive Poetic and Adam Fitzgerald. More T.B.A.

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Berl's Poetry posted a recording of the end of the first semester reading the students in the MFA program did. If you weren't able to make it and wanted to hear what we've been up to or if you were there and wanted to hear it all again: now is your chance!

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First rally for #akaigurley announced at his vigil happening now… 12/27/2014 2pm

Pink Houses 2724 Linden Blvd. BK, NY 11208

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Lorraine Currelley reading "It's Raining Ferguson" at the Dec. 3 2014 Women Writers of Color series, organized by Mahogany Browne and sponsored by the MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute. On sax: Sahji. www.womenwritersofcolor.tumblr.com

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Lorraine Currelley reads a poem at the WWOC: The Real (end of semester members' reading).