Come say hi to us at AWP in LA!
We’ll be hanging out with the very rad No Dear & Atlas Review at book fair table #1842 on Thursday and Friday.
On Thursday 3/31, we’ll be teaming up with the legendary queer feminist road show Sister Spit for one night of unforgettable power babehood!
Weird Sister Spit
When: Thursday, 3/31 @ 6PM Continue reading
Filed under Events
Reductress Presents: The St. Patrick’s Day Wellness Retreat
Thursday, March 17th, 2016
The Bell House, Brooklyn, NY
As the lights dimmed at the Bell House on St. Patrick’s evening, comedian and host for the evening presented by Reductress, Anna Drezen appeared like a Celtic apparition, promising to guide us to wellness with a “whatever it takes” leadership style and killer tights. I had slept 2 hours, the back of my head was a dreadlock, and my BFF was admittedly cramping and free-bleeding by my side.
Also on this journey was a sizeable group of intelligent women in various states of intoxication (read: coven), and according to an audience survey, one single man who upon further questioning was not employed. Imagine the crowd at an early Saturday morning Barre class, except totally not like that at all. Continue reading
Filed under We Were There
Artist Alyssa Boni has been doing the Lord’s work for Elle UK, photoshopping men out of photos of politicians to prove what should be an obvious point: we need #MoreWomen in politics. For example:
Filed under Uncategorized
When I heard that Professor Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and her colleagues at Umass Amherst’s Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and Afro-American Studies departments were planning “Feminist Poetics: Legacies of June Jordan,” I was super excited. This one-day symposium sounds so amazing—it’s billed as “celebrating the work of feminist poet, scholar and activist June Jordan, and her legacies in contemporary feminist poetics.” The conference will feature panels on Writing Feminist Activism, The Combahee River Collective and Black Feminist Foundations, Feminist Poetics as Theory and Praxis, and more. Speakers, moderators and performers include renowned feminist thinkers Sonia Sanchez, Evie Shockley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Cheryl Clarke and many others. And it’s all happening THIS Friday, March 25th.
For me, Umass Amherst is an extra-special place: I went to college there, and the Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies department is where I learned about the intersections of art and activism, and came into my own as both a writer and a feminist. When I learned about the Feminist Poetics symposium, I had to reach out to Mecca Jamilah Sullivan to ask her about how it all came together, why June Jordan’s legacy matters right now, and—because Mecca is an incredible fiction writer herself—how Jordan’s poetics influence her own work as a writer.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Photo Credit Marcia Wilson
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her scholarly and creative works on gender and sexuality in African Diaspora cultures have appeared in Best New Writing, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, Palimpsest, Crab Orchard Review, GLQ, Jacket2, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM, TriQuarterly, Public Books, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, and The Feminist Wire, where she is Associate Editor for Arts and Culture. She is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), a current finalist for both the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. A current Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships, scholarships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon-Mays Foundation, Williams College, Rutgers University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is currently completing a scholarly manuscript, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, which explores the politics of formal innovation in global black women’s literary and artistic cultures.
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Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
“Even when the work is about the Self, we want and expect that others will weigh in on it, critically, as art. But many poets—especially, I wager, queer, feminist, marginalized, and young poets—read a Myles poem and see, beyond the work as literature, a vision of the self we would like to enact in the world: brash, confident, living large.”–Arielle Greenberg on Eileen Myles
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
During a recent first-time viewing of Romancing the Stone, I found myself transfixed by the opening scene: the protagonist is alone in her work space, deep in the throes of her writing process. As I watched, I wondered—how many similar scenes of women writers at work had filmmakers captured, and what themes could I make out across them? Would I spot my own writing habits at play in their fictionalized ones? I set out to find more of these depictions in movies and TV shows, pressing pause whenever I spotted a lady-identified writer mid-scribe. Behold these ten examples of women writers at work, presented chronologically, spanning 30 years of TV and film.
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Adventure novelist sobs while completing her manuscript in Romancing the Stone [1984]. Visible writerly equipment: oversized plaid nightshirt with sound-canceling headphones, overturned Chinese takeout box, lit tapered candle, typewriter, can of Tab, an empty box of tissues, the silhouette of Texas on a cork board. Not pictured: a cat named Romeo, tiny airplane-style liquor bottles, a post-it note reminding her to buy more tissues. Continue reading
Filed under Movies + TV
When I read Myriam Gurba’s Painting Their Portraits in Winter last year I got that special book-soul-mate feeling that the best books give you, a sense that someone really GETS you, and the universe. Because I can never love anything without going full fangirl, I knew I had to reach out to Myriam for an interview, which– lucky you!– you get read below.
Myriam Gurba, Ms. Gurba, if you’re nasty, is a native Santa Marian. She attended U.C. Berkeley thanks to affirmative action. She is the author of two short story collections, Dahlia Season and Painting Their Portraits in Winter. Dahlia Season won the Edmund White Award, which is given to queer writers for outstanding debut fiction. The book was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Gurba is also the author of two poetry collections, Wish You Were Me and Sweatsuits of the Damned. She has toured North America twice with avant-garde literary and performance troupe Sister Spit. Gurba’s other writing can be found in places such as Entropy.com, TIME.com, and Lesfigues.com. She creates digital and photographic art that has been exhibited at galleries and museums.
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Gina Abelkop: My first question has to be about one of my favorite things about your writing: your sense of humor. It’s silly, smart, biting, and joyful even in stories and poems that are emotionally taut. How and on what teeth was this sense of humor cut? Who are some of your favorite humorists and what is it that you love about their humor and/or work?
Myriam Gurba: My sense of humor was primarily sculpted by the sickest people I know: HELLO MOM AND DAD. My dad likes to joke about the horrific, like free-range children and customer service, and by example, he taught me that these are the things you are supposed to laugh about. My mom is different. She’s more elf than human. She doesn’t say funny things; she says things funny. For example, she’ll tell a story about getting into a car accident but she’ll refer to her car as her mystique since she actually drives a Mercury Mystique and her story will take on this exciting, Daliesque quality because imagine a normal conversation about a car accident but replace the word car with mystique. My parents, however, aren’t into queef jokes. In fact, I’m not even sure they could name a queef though I’m certain they’re familiar with the sound. In high school, I was socially attracted to girls who got accused of being unfeminine since they were funny and gross and so they shaped me, too. Boys accused me of not being feminine and of having too big of lips. My favorite funny people are people I know. My boyfriend makes me giggle. When I have low blood sugar and am surrounded by whites, everything gets hilarious. I appreciate humor that is gross, goofy, self-conscious, and, above all, humiliating. As far as publicly funny people go, I like Carol Burnett, Gilda Radner, Cardi B, Kristen Wiig pretending to be Bjork, Peter Sellers, Cheech Marin, Chris Rock and angry teenagers.
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
Go here to watch a documentary on Discwoman, “a New York-based DJ collective and booking agency, exploring the role of women in electronic music”.
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
Queen Crescent is a heavy rock band with psychedelic leanings from Oakland, California. They’re women of color, some of them are queer, and all of them shred. Queen Crescent has a sense of humor, an unapologetic prismatic identity, chops, knowledge, confidence and direction. The guitars are tuned low, and the flute floats over in what feels like a playful counterpunch or call-and-response. Vocals seem to traverse the land between. The ambiguity of the crescent moon itself might reflect conceptually in sonic, layered anthems, which are physically hypnotic to witness live—such music pulses through your body, even if you’re wearing earplugs. I can especially hear this in the band’s vocals, which keep to a low register, even when belting truth before some guitar hooks hit, crashing like waves.
I got the chance to corner Queen Crescent and ask them some questions about their sound, their future, and their recently released video for their new song, “Zodiacal Woman,” which is directed by Doug Avery, with director of photography Ethan Indorf.
Filed under Interviews, Music + Playlists
Confession time: as much as I’d like to consider myself a well-rounded reader, I hardly ever read fantasy books that don’t contain “Harry Potter” in the title. It’s hard to find one I like. My brain can’t find a way to care about stories of troops of men trekking through dragon-filled lands to find a mysterious object. I can’t relate to a lot of the typical fantasy genre novels that come to mind.
Luckily, there are authors and books out there like Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories (the sequel to A Stranger in Olondria, though it can totally stand on its own, too), a fantastic tale of an ancient war and four women both brought together and torn apart by it’s horrors, all doing their very best to change my perception on the whole fantasy genre.
What’s different about this novel? Although it’s hard to put my finger on the *exact * reason, let me just spout off a few: Gorgeous, gorgeous poetic writing. An invented language that’s equivalent to botany on a page. A kickass leader of the troops named Tav, a woman who basically picks up the slack and outshines the male counterparts trying to follow in her warrior footsteps. Romantic, racial, religious storylines and struggles that a non-fantasy devotee can care about.
Not convinced? Read this interview with Sofia herself, and then go read The Winged Histories for yourself:
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Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
