Oct
8
6:30 PM18:30

Gesture & Rupture @ Countercapture

Operating at the limits of the image, artists in Countercapture recalibrate the standard representational capture of Blackness. The featured works use redaction variously as material ground, as methodological process, and as fugitive strategy, gesturing toward alternative paradigms for image-making. Countercapture looks at redaction and opacity as aesthetically and politically constructive processes that make-present while refusing transparent access to bodies and subjects, in the vein of a “right to opacity” as articulated by Édouard Glissant.

JOIN US for a performance by artist and poet Jayson P. Smith followed by an exhibition walkthrough by curator Katherine Adams for a deeper look at the works in Countercapture.

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Broken Bells: Sept 2018 Reading
Sep
9
6:30 PM18:30

Broken Bells: Sept 2018 Reading

Broken Bells returns for a new season to a new venue with one spectacle of a reading, featuring some of co-curator / birthday boy Jake Matkov's favorite poets writing today: Cathy Linh Che, Cynthia Cruz, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, and Jayson P. Smith!

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

(Feel free to come between 4-6:30 PM and toast birthday cheers with September's host, Jake!)

Our new venue, Berg'n, is a large space with a full bar, coffee shop, and food stands! The reading takes place in the backroom space (make a left immediately after the pinball machines). And! The Broken Bells audience will have exclusive happy hour specials available at the bar

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R E D book launch + party with Chase Berggrun & Friends
Aug
16
to Aug 17

R E D book launch + party with Chase Berggrun & Friends

Join Chase Berggrun 🧛‍♀️ & friends to celebrate the launch 🚀 of their first book R E D 🦇💃❤ from Birds, LLC. 🍾

With readings & performances by: 
Tommy Pico
Wendy Xu
Wo Chan
Jayson Smith
Emily Skillings
Liz Bowen
Ana Božičević

as well as great food 🌮🍲🌯, drinks 🍸🍹🥃, including R E D-themed cocktails habanero margarita & Bloody Mary, music 🎵, dancing 💃, projected silent screenings of Dracula films, unbridled love & joy ❤, defiant femme energy, & the blood of the innocent.

🦇❤ Vampy & goth looks encouraged 🦇❤ 

In a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review, Publisher’s Weekly says of R E D: In Berggrun’s striking debut, a book-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that text becomes fertile soil for cultivating a complex story of sexual awakening, domestic abuse, and liberation. 

Chase Berggrun's book R E D will be available at the launch party at a discounted price, and for more info and to order, visit: http://www.birdsllc.com/catalog/red

Free and open to all

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Cave Canem: Poets on Craft
Mar
27
6:30 PM18:30

Cave Canem: Poets on Craft

Ft. Cyrus Cassells | Khadijah Queen | Moderated by Jayson P. Smith


The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, Cassells is the author of six books, including his most recent, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). Queen is the author of five publications. Her most recent, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), was a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series. Jayson P. Smith, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry moderates. 

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WEIRDD Reading Series
Feb
26
7:30 PM19:30

WEIRDD Reading Series

Ft. Rio Cortez, Jayson P. Smith, Yanyi


Rio Cortez is a Pushcart-nominated poet, living & working in Harlem. Rio has received fellowships from Poet's House, Cave Canem and Canto Mundo Foundations. Her manuscript I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains was selected by Ross Gay as the inaugural winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, now available from Jai-Alai Books. https://www.riocortez.com/

Yanyi is a poet and critic based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a 2017-2018 Asian American Writers Workshop Margins Fellow and contributing editor at Foundry. The recipient of a 2015 Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House, Yanyi's poems and criticism have appeared in Model View Culture, cellpoems, The Cortland Review, and DIARY, chaplet #193 at Belladonna* Collaborative. Find him at yanyiii.com.

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Page Meets Stage
Feb
25
6:00 PM18:00

Page Meets Stage

Mahogany L. Browne | Jason Reynolds | Hosted by Jayson P. Smith

Doors open at 5:45P


Jason Reynolds is the author of four critically acclaimed books and was proclaimed "easily one of the most promising of Young Adult novelists in the market today" by NBC. Besides collecting starred-reviews, he is a New York Times bestselling author and was awarded the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent; was a Coretta Scott King Honoree twice, made it to the Time books of the year list, won the Kirkus Award, was a National Book Award finalist, and, in 2017, was an Odyssey and a CSK Honoree, a recipient of the Schneider Middle Grade award, and was named Indies First Spokesperson of the year.

Mahogany L. Browne, a Cave Canem, Poets House & Serenbe Focus alum, is the author of several books including Redbone (nominated for NAACP Outstanding Literary Works), Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution & About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Manhattanville Review, Muzzle, Union Station Mag, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Joint & The Feminist Wire. She is the co-editor of forthcoming anthology The Break Beat Poets: Black Girl Magic and and chapbook collection Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books). She is an Urban Word NYC Artistic Director (as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices), founder of Women Writers of Color Reading Room, Director of BLM@Pratt Programming and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Browne is also the publisher of Penmanship Books, the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday Night Slam curator and recent graduate from Pratt Institute MFA Writing & Activism program.

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Jan
16
7:00 PM19:00

INDICTUS Book Launch

Join Natalie Eilbert as she launches her second poetry collection, Indictus, winner of Noemi Press's Poetry Award, into the world at a new favorite Greenpoint spot, Threes @ Franklin + Kent! Help her speak the unsaid, trouble her troubling subjects, and rupture the status quo.

Readers: Jayson P. Smith, Paul Tran, Dorothea Lasky

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Jun
17
5:00 PM17:00

The Next Generation of Black Poets: Cave Canem Fellows and Friends

Poets Aziza Barnes, Tyree Daye, Aricka Foreman, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Kamden Hilliard, and Jayson P. Smith come together in Pittsburgh to present their work, part of the next generation of black poetry, with Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela (aka DJ Halfbreed) DJing. Kamden Hilliard and Aricka Foreman offer an interactive community workshop at the Kelly-Strayhorn's Alloy Studios.

Doors Open at 5PM.

CAAPP Event Page

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Jun
10
3:15 PM15:15

AMPLIT Fest [Panel] - Literary Citizenship: The Writer's Identity

Event

Co-produced by Lamprophonic and Summer on the Hudson, AmpLit Fest is a free, daylong festival that brings authors of all backgrounds, styles, and levels of recognition to center stage.

As writers, we face the tension between a desire to withdraw during creation versus a desire to join a community. With the rise of the term "literary citizenship," writers too are faced with pressure to participate in writing communities in a myriad of ways - attending readings, buying books, exchanging facebook likes and retweets. In this panel, we will investigate the connection between who you are and what you write -- when does identity guide your work, and when does it overshadow, and is this a good thing? What obligation does the writer have as a representative? How does identity play into the literary community(-ies) we participate in, and is this compartmentalizing, a refuge, both, or neither? We'll look at what it means to be a literary citizen in NYC, in America, and globally (and maybe all 3, at once!). Is it possible that the idea of literary citizenship stifles more than it supports writers? This panel is moderated by Katie Longofono, featuring Jayson P. Smith, Joanna C. Valente, and Wendy Lu. 

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Jun
6
7:00 PM19:00

NOMAD 2x1: Paul Tran, Aziza Barnes, Patricia Smith

Paul Tran, Aziza Barnes, Patricia Smith

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AZIZA BARNES is blk & alive. Winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize Aziza’s first full length collection i be but i ain’t, is from YesYes Books 2016. Their chapbook, me Aunt Jemima & the nailgun, was the winner of the inaugural Exploding Pinecone Prize from Button Poetry in 2012. They are a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival and co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. Their play BLKS has a world premiere at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago Dec 7th- Jan 21st.

PATRICIA SMITH is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration ion with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was featured in the anthology Best American Mystery Stories. 

She is a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, as well as an instructor at the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.

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May
31
7:00 PM19:00

#GetSomeJoy: A Blackstravaganza for Mental Health Awareness

  • Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Join writer, mental health advocate, and co-host of The Extraordinary Negroes podcast Alexander Hardy for a night of merriment, art, readings by poets and storytellers, and candid conversations to increase awareness, address stigmas around mental illness, and promote wellness.

Readings by Alex Hardy, Jayson P. Smith, Hari Ziyad, Darnell Lamont Walker, Andrew Shade

Doors at 7 | Event at 8:20

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