If you live in Brooklyn/NYC or thereabouts, you are in the for a treat tomorrow! Popsickle 2016 features readings by Naomi Jackson, Wo Chan, our own WS editor Marisa Crawford, Joey De Jesus, Jami Attenberg and many more.
For those of you on the West Coast (Los Angeles, specifically), This Will Hurt Me More Than You opens at Last Projects tomorrow, feat. work by Ciriza, Michael Dee, and Cynthia Herrera; tomorrow night’s opening features a (not to be missed) a performance by Ciriza.
Alice Bag is interviewed at Bitch about her new solo album, how teaching informs her work, and more: “But when I go out on book tours and speak to students, it feels like I’m teaching again. It’s wonderful to get into discussions with college students who’ve read my book. As artists, we sometimes have opportunities to spark discussions about the changes we’d like to see. I’ve been able to do that through my music and touring, so in a way, I guess I’m still teaching, I’m just not in a classroom anymore.”
WS contributor Rios De La Luz is interviewed at On the Block Radio’s podcast about “her evolving relationship to her xicana identity, the Portland writing scene and the complexities of being embraced by predominantly white communities, and how time travel and Dr. Who are as much a part of her identity as is The Day of the Dead and her ancestral roots.”
Feng Sun Chen is the featured writer in the new issue of Aspasiology, which features work by a single writer + creative responses to that work: “I want to live / up to the green reality / of our mutual electronic / to see my nature / impersonal strength / I need the lance / to express / to express.”
At Mother Jones, Madison Pauly write on Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Richards being charged with felony “lynching”: “The original California lynching law dates back to 1933, according to the Guardian; historically it was used to protect African Americans from vigilantes. In recent years, however, critics have charged that police are using the law to punish activists, including members of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter.”
Hilton Als has a new art exhibition in NYC at the Artist’s Institute (up through 8/7) titled James Baldwin/Jim Brown and the Children; read more about it at The Creator’s Project: “In this exhibition, Als creates an apartment sized site-specific work that is populated with smaller objects that seem to present James Baldwin as a mirror of Als, the people he loved and grieved, and those who show him affection now. He terms these people, “the children.” They include the gay black writers Gary Fisher, Jesse Murry, and Julius Eastman, and artists John Edmonds, Jennie C. Jones, Darryl Turner, Troy Michie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who all have work in the exhibition.”
Read and/or watch a video about the Monument Quilt at Refinery 29, a collaborative quilting project addressing sexual violence and rape: “As the video above shows, the resulting quilt is assembled in a public space, as the survivors piece together their squares to form a quilt that displays all of their experiences in one piece. It’s powerful to see, and that’s the point — all at once, the Monument Quilt raises awareness and gives survivors a chance to publicly heal.”
Feminist activist Christen Clifford has been suspended from FB for posting photos tagged #FuckCancer while writing about her own experiences with uterine and ovarian cancer: “I am so sick of women’s bodies being shamed…I am so sick of fighting for bodily autonomy. I am so sick of society telling us we are too emotional or too dirty or too unclean.”
On June 6th the 28th annual Lambda Literary Awards took place, with honorees and winners including Hilton Als, Chinelo Okparanta, Dawn Lundy Martin, the Glitter & Grit anthology and more.
At Entropy, Trisha Low interviews Joan Pinkvoss, editor of Aunt Lute Press: “This is when literature can allow us to respect each other, realizing all the while that we can never know the entire story. It’s an important defense against the Donald Trumps of the world.”
What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3
