Feminism/s
April 24, 2012: Sister Spit
8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Sister Spit is a legendary, raucous, rowdy performance gang featuring a vanload of multimedia, queer-centric brilliance. This multimedia explosion of taste-makers, novelists, luminaries, chanteuses, performance artist, poets, and filmmakers includes host Michelle Tea, singer/songwriter/transgender extravaganza Justin Vivian Bond, writer and musician Brontez Purnell, genius performer and playwright Erin Markey, comic artist and writer Cassie J. Sneider, and nationally- ranking slam poet Kit Yan.
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Recently described as "the greatest cabaret artist of (v's) generation" by Hilton Als in the New Yorker, singer, songwriter and Tony-nominated performance artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond [April 15 – 30, 2012], is an Obie, Bessie and Ethyl Eichelberger Award winner. V’s debut EP Pink Slip was released in July 2009. In 2007 v premiered Justin Bond is Close To You, a reinterpretation of the Carpenter's classic album Close To You performed in its entirety in Central Park and subsequently presented by The Sydney Opera House in Australia and San Francisco’s fabled Castro Theater. As one-half of the Performance duo Kiki and Herb, Justin Vivian has toured the world headlining at Carnegie Hall, The Sydney Opera House, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and has starred in a Tony nominated run on Broadway, Kiki and Herb Alive on Broadway (The Helen Hayes Theatre) and Off-Broadway Coup de Theatre (The Cherry Lane Theatre). Film credits include a starring role in John Cameron Mitchell’s feature Shortbus, Charles Hermann-Wurmfeld’s Fancy’s Persuasion as well as Imaginary Heroes and Jon Moritsugu’s Mod Fuck Explosion. Television appearances include Ugly Betty and Late Night With Conan O’Brian. Mx. Bond joins the tour April 15 – 27.
Brontez Purnell is a writer (columnist for Maximum Rock N Roll and the creator of FAG SCHOOL fanzine) a musician (Younger Lovers, ex-Gravy Train!!!), dancer (Brontez Purnell Dance Company). An Alabama native Mr. Purnell has spent much of the last decade in sunny Oakland, CA where he plots and hangs out making all the underground music and dance happenings. He is a Cancer, has a fetish for left-handed people, is currently working on his debut novella "Johnny, would you love me if my dick were bigger?", and will attend Witch School next year.
Erin Markey is a Brooklyn based writer/performer. She recently starred in the NYC premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes at the Hudson Hotel. She was a series regular on LOGO’s Jeffery and Cole Casserole TV show. Her solo musical, Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tail played at PS 122 and toured with The Sex Workers Art Show. She is a company member of Half Straddle and her work in FAMILY was heralded as “the scariest performance of the year” in 2009 by Time Out NY. As a playwright, she was invited to the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and is currently developing her newest work, The Dardy Family Home Movies by Stephen Sondheim by Erin Markey, to premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Kinotek Series in the Fall of 2011. As a cabaret artist, she regularly presents work at Our Hit Parade with Kenny Mellman, Bridget Everett and Neal Medlyn at Joe’s Pub (The Public).
Cassie J. Sneider is a weirdo from Long Island who makes comic books. Her first real live book, Fine Fine Music, is being published in April 2011 by Raw Art Press. She enjoys driving long distances on very little sleep, competitive eating championships, and karaoke. Her celebrity crushes include Gordon Ramsay, Adam Richman, and the woman who played Crystal on Roseanne. She also sings for Electric Bubblebath, the greatest rockandroll band of all time.
Michelle Tea is the author of four memoirs, a collection of poetry and the novel Rose of No Man’s Land. She has edited anthologies on fashion, class, personal narrative and lesbo-centric fiction. Her article on Beth Ditto and the Gossip (The Gossip Takes Paris) appeared in 2010 Best Music Writing. She co-founded Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road Show in the 90s and is the diabolical mind behind Sister Spit: Next Generation. She lives in San Francisco where she founded and is artistic director of queer literary arts organization, RADAR Productions. Tea recently completed an apocalyptic sci-fi novel, a young adult novel and co-wrote Coal To Diamonds with Beth Ditto.
As seen on HBO Documentary Asians Aloud, Kit Yan tell stories through slam poetry from the lens of a transgender Asian American from Hawaii now in New York. Kit’s work has been taught coast to coast, from San Francisco State to Harvard. He has been seen speaking at the National Equality March, performing on the San Francisco Pride main stage, Creating Change, and is a nationally ranking slam poet. Kit is also the first ever and reigning Mr. Transman 2010. He has been seen on PBS’ Asian in America, MYX TV, Autostraddle, and has received glowing reviews from New York Magazine, Bitch Magazine, and Curve Magazine.
Feminism/s is an interdisciplinary series exploring how art, criticism, political action, and community building can create structural and cultural solutions to gender hierarchies. Feminism/s seeks to amplify the multiplicity of voices engaged in the critique of the gender hierarchy, plant footprints in absence, slit the invisible veins of social construction, and learn about activist approaches. The series takes place at the Kelly Writers House, a collaborative freespace dedicated to the literary arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
March 29, 2012: Masha Tupitsyn
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Masha Tupitsyn is the author of
LACONIA: 1,200
Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a
collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology
Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009), which was voted
one of the best film books of 2009 by Dennis Cooper, January Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and
Chicago's New City. She is currently working on a new book of essays on film, Screen to Screen, as well as a book about John Cusack called Star Notes: John Cusack and The Politics of Acting. Her fiction and criticism
has appeared in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers
Writing in the 21st Century (2008) and the Encyclopedia Project Volume
II, F-K (2010), as well as Broome Street Review, Keyframe, Specter Magazine, BOMB, Indiewire's Press Play, Venus Magazine, Bookforum, Fence, The Rumpus, 2nd Floor
Projects, Animal Shelter, The Fanzine,
Make/Shift, NYFA, Vertebrae, and San Francisco's KQED's The Writer's
Block. She regularly contributes video essays on film and culture to Ryeberg Curated
Video, which features writers like Mary Gaitskill and Sheila Heti. In 2011, she wrote a
radio play for Performa 11, Time for Nothing, the New Visual Art
Performance Biennial in conjunction with Frieze Magazine. You can read
her blog Love Dog, a new book project, at: http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/.
November 17, 2011: "The Gurlesque" with Joyelle McSweeney and Kim Rosenfield
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of The
Necropastoral (Spork Press), an artist's book featuring poems and essays on the themes of
genre & contamination and original collages by Andrew Shuta; the lyric genre novels Flet (Fence) and Nylund, the Sarcographer
(Tarpaulin Sky Press); and The Red Bird and The
Commandrine, two books of poetry from Fence. She is the co-founder and editor of Action
Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-journal for international writing
and hybrid forms, as well as a founding contributor to the collective blog montevidayo.com. She
lives in Indiana and teaches in the Notre Dame MFA program. Percussion Grenade:
Poems and Plays is forthcoming from Fence in Spring 2012, and the prose book Salamandrine: 8 Gothics is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky in the following
Fall.
September 22, 2011: Inga Muscio
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Inga Muscio is a feminist, anti-racist, and environmentalist writer
and public speaker. She is the author of Cunt: a declaration of independence,
Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist
Society, and most recently Rose: Love in Violent Times. The
second oldest in a family of four, Muscio was born and raised in Santa Maria, California, attended
The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.
March 24, 2011: A Reading and Discussion with Vanessa Place
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues
Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), Notes on
Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), and
The
Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law (2010). A book of conceptual poetry, Statement of Facts, will be published in France as Exposé des Faits; a trilogy of conceptual work, Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and
Argument, is forthcoming from Blanc Press (USA). Her Factory-type
chapbook series is available via oodpress (Brazil). Place is also a regular contributor to
X-tra Art Quarterly, and has lectured and performed internationally.
March 3, 2011: Whenever We Feel Like It Present Elizabeth Robinson and Rachel Blau DuPlessis
8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Elizabeth Robinson's most recent books are The
Orphan & its Relations (Fence) and Also Known As (Apogee).
Three Novels, a collection of poetry, is forthcoming this year from
Omnidawn. Robinson has been a recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for
Contemporary Arts. She co-edits EtherDome Chapbooks and Instance Press. With Jennifer Phelps, she
is also co-editing an essay collection, Quo Anima, on contemporary women
poets and spirituality.
The Collage Poems of Drafts (just published in 2011) and
Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010) are the newest poetry books by
Rachel Blau DuPlessis from Salt Publishing. She is a poet-critic whose
other works include The Pink Guitar and Blue
Studios. Forthcoming from Iowa is Purple Passages: Patriarchal Poetry
and its Ends.
March 2, 2011: Karen Finley
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
No
other contemporary performing artist has captured the psychological complexity of this decade's
political and social milestones as Karen Finley has in the past ten years.
In her inimitable style, Finley has embodied some of the most troubling figures to cast a long shadow
on the public imagination, and has envisioned a kind of catharsis within each drama: Liza Minnelli
responds to the September 11 attacks; Terri Schaivo explains why Americans love a woman in a coma;
Martha Stewart dumps George W. Bush during their tryst on the eve of the Republican National Convention;
Silda Spitzer tells the former governor why "I'm sorry" just isn't enough; Jackie O cries, "Please
stop looking at me!"
Finley's new book and transcripts of her performances The Reality Shows blazes through a dark and vivid era. These seething performance pieces are fully contextualized with introductions by the author and a time-line of cultural and political milestones since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Karen Finley's raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has presented her visual art, performances and plays internationally. The author of many books including A Different Kind of Intimacy, George & Martha, and Shock Treatment, she is a professor at the Tisch School of Art and Public Policy at New York University. Visit The Feminist Press to find out more about Finley's book The Reality Shows.
February 28, 2011: Live at the Writers House Presents the Leeway Foundation
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Catzie Vilayphonh |
Dr. Tanji Gilliam |
Monique E. |
Lorelei Narvaja |
Benita Cooper |
The Leeway Foundation, which began in 1993 as a foundation dedicated to supporting women artists in the Philadelphia area, is committed to art making as an integral part of social change, to movement building, and anti-oppression work where Leeway is accountable, accessible, part of and governed by, the communities Leeway's programs support.
Leeway is guided by the values of fearlessness in action, speech, and self-examination and commits to breaking down boundaries and barriers with creativity, respect, and openness to the process.
Leeway funds women and trans artists creating social change.
Catzie Vilayphonh, 2010 Arts and Change Grantee, will create "Laos in the House," an innovative writing and performance workshop. The show will promote and provide an accessible art form via live storytelling among Lao American refugees in Philadelphia.
Dr. Tanji Gilliam, 2010 Arts and Change Grantee, has a created a project entitled "do you have any scars?/The Architecture of Violence". It is a photography, video, and literary project that gives voice to women who have been impacted by domestic violence, broadly defined. Tanji hopes that this work will encourage other circles and communities of black women and promote dialogue and inspire healing.
2010 Arts and Change Grantee Monique E. Hankerson will produce A Voice That Bears a Likeness to My Soul, a photographic and poetic journey that will document the story of ten homeless LGBTQ youths in Philadelphia. She hopes to shed light on homelessness and force people to become advocates of those in need.
Lorelei Narvaja, 2010 Arts and Change Grantee, will document an oral and photographic history of her Filipino female relatives in the United States – those who immigrated and those who were born here – exploring their experiences assimilating and resisting Western culture, the dichotomy of a traditional or Western life, and the notions of success and beauty.
2010 Arts and Change Grantee Benita Cooper will facilitate "Seniors Storytelling Day", an interactive performance art event bringing Philadelphia teenagers and seniors together to collaborate on documenting and re-telling the stories of the seniors. Benita hopes to develop a stronger sense of community by building a common ground for understanding between generations.
February 8, 2011: Revolution Girl Style Again
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Author Sara Marcus will read from her critically acclaimed Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution and moderate a discussion among legendary Riot Grrrl musician Kathleen Hanna, activist and founder of Exotic Fever Records Katy Otto and the founder of Girls Rock! Philly, Beth Warshaw-Duncan. Topics will range from discussion of the panelists own participation in the movement to what women in music can and should be doing today. A concert at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut) will follow, featuring Philadelphia bands Trophy Wife and Cat Vet, as well as Providence's Whore Paint, with all proceeds benefiting the Girls Rock! Philly organization, which encourages teenage girls to pick up instruments and start bands.
Kathleen Hanna is a NYC artist best known for her groundbreaking performances as the singer of the seminal 90's punk band, Bikini Kill and her more recent, highly acclaimed multimedia group Le Tigre. She was a pivotal figure in what became known as 'Riot Grrrl', a feminist movement that took place within the underground music scene between 1900-1996. She is currently gearing up for the release of a performance based documentary called Le Tigre: On Tour, writing a new album and doing work surround the recent donation of her papers to the Fales Archive at NYU.
Sara Marcus is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn. Her book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution was published by Harper Perennial in October 2010. Marcus's prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Salon, Bookforum, Artforum.com, Time Out New York, The Advocate, EOAGH, Encyclopedia, Tantalum, The Art of Touring, and Heeb, where she was the politics editor for five years. She is a cofounder of New Herring Press, a collectively run micropress focusing on prose chapbooks. She received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.
Katy Otto recently relocated to Philadelphia after living in Washington, DC. Ms. Otto has over a decade of experience in fundraising for violence prevention, women's issues, youth development, and arts organizations. She started playing drums when she was 17 and has not gone one week without them since. At 22, she and two friends founded the independent label Exotic Fever Records, which just celebrated ten years and over forty internationally distributed indepedent releases. She has done contract development work creating grassroots fundraising plans and authoring proposals for social justice organizations nationally. Katy has toured the country several times playing drums in her former band Del Cielo. Her current band, Trophy Wife, just released a full length debut, Patience Fury, on 307Knox Records. She co-founded the national Visions in Feminism conference. She was a member for over twelve years of the group Positive Force DC, a volunteer punk collective that organizes concerts and events for social change and plans community actions. She has done radical sexual assault prevention and survivor solidarity work and workshops.
Beth Warshaw-Duncan is the line producer at the NPR music program The World Café. She has also been the production director of WXPN, a noncommercial radio station in Philadelphia, and has edited live sessions with bands, directed live & recorded shows, & edited in soundproof studios all day (and all of the night). She is also a board member of the 215 Festival in Philadelphia, is certified as a secondary-school teacher in Pennsylvania & has taught Writing For Radio at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as sound & recording workshops for the Black Lily Film & Music Festival. After volunteering for two years as a counselor & workshop instructor at Willie Mae Rock Camp in New York, Beth founded & is the executive director of Girls Rock Philly, a rock & empowerment camp where girls ages 9-17 learn instruments, write songs & form their own bands. Girls Rock Philly held its first camp session in August 2007 & is a founding member of the international Girls Rock Camp Alliance.
November 9, 2010 - December 7, 2010: Susan Bee, a Retrospective
Susan Bee is an artist, editor and designer who works and lives in
New York City. Her work examines and questions intersections of identity, gender roles and secular
Jewish culture. As an artist, she believes strongly in the role of the imagination and the importance
of poetry, humor, irony, memory, and fantasy in art. She also believes in idiosyncratic,
individualistic, and eccentric art making. She has published six artist's books with Granary Books,
including collaborations with poets: Bed Hangings, with Susan Howe,
A Girl's Life, with Johanna Drucker, Log Rhythms and
Little Orphan Anagram with Charles Bernstein and The Burning Babe and
Other Poems with Jerome Rothenberg. She is coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G:
An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, with writings by over 100 artists,
critics, and poets, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She was the coeditor of
M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues from 1986-1996 and
is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.
October 21, 2010: an evening with Make/Shift Magazine featuring Jessica Hoffman, Hilary Goldberg, and local guests
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Make/shift magazine creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art. Made by an editorial collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives, make/shift embraces the multiple and shifting identities of feminist communities. We know there's exciting work being done in various spaces and forms by people seriously and playfully resisting and creating alternatives to systematic oppression. Make/shift exists to represent, participate in, critique, provoke, and inspire more of that good work.
Jessica Hoffmann is a freelance writer/editor and activist. She
has contributed to numerous publications, including ColorLines,
AlterNet, and the anthologies We Don't Need Another
Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists and Nobody
Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. She blogs at The
Bilerico Project and is active in local and national organizing around food, housing, and
more. In 2008, Utne named her one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing
Your World.
Hilary Goldberg's films and music videos—including in the
Spotlight, Beyond Lovely, Transliminal Criminal, and Katastrophe's Big
Deal—have been screened in venues around the world, from the American Cinematheque in
Hollywood to the Women Make Waves Festival in Taiwan. Goldberg is also a poet, writer, and
spoken-word performer who has performed at the RADAR reading series, the California African
American Museum, the Bumbershoot Festival, the Hopland Women's Music Festival, Reed College,
and Oregon Country Fair, among other venues.
Goldberg has been a recipient of a Panavision New Filmmaker Grant and a POWER UP filmmaker grant. Her work has been profiled or reviewed in Bitch, Curve, Girlfriends, and other publications.
October 13, 2010: A Lunch Program with Eileen Myles on "Inferno"
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
RSVP: to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call
215-746-POEM
Eileen Myles was born in Boston in 1949, attended Catholic schools
in Arlington, Mass. and graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974 to be
a poet. Since then she's become widely known in writing circles, art circles, queer circles and
beyond as one of the most restless interpreters of the American vernacular, moving fluidly from
the poetry to writing novels, essays and plays, art reviews, performances and libretti, and perhaps
most notably as someone "with an uncanny knack" as John Ashbery put it, "for making people feel
uncomfortable and awake... chanting softly and beautifully the harsh if humorous realities that
combine to make whatever life a poet can piece together today." Myles' collection of essays
The Importance of Being Iceland, for which she received a Warhol/Creative
Capital grant is just out from Semiotext(e)/MIT. Eileen also writes novels
(Chelsea Girls, Cool for You) and libretti ("Hell") and many many poems
(Sorry, Tree, Not Me). She ran St. Mark's Poetry Project in the 80s.
In 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President. She's a Professor Emeritus
of Writing & Literature at UC San Diego. She lives in New York.