Wednesday, July 16
Intergenerational Writers Lab Book Release and Closing Reading &Reception
with IWL 2008 participants
A collaboration of Kearny Street Workshop and Intersection for the Arts
Join Kearny Street Workshop and Intersection for the Arts for the release of the new anthology I Saw My Ex at a Party and the closing reading & reception for the 2008 Intergenerational Writers Lab (IWL). The evening features readings by IWL 2008 participants Tina Bartolome, Nawaaz Ahmed, Norman Zelaya, Arisa White, Cathlin Goulding, Vickie Vértiz, Juliana Mojica, Anthem Salgado, Joyce Futa, Talia Taylor, Amir el-Chidiac, Rui Bing Zheng, and Tessa Fontaine, as well as a reception for the new IWL 2008 anthology which presents new work from the IWL 2008 participants as well as from IWL 2008 lead artists Ricardo Bracho and devorah major. The new publication also features graphic design by Kelly Beile, and letter pressed covers coutesy of Littoral Press.
Left: IWL 2008 graphic design by Kelly Biele
Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Time: 7 -9 pm
Location: Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia Street, @ 16th Street, San Francisco
Cost: $5 - 15 sliding scale.
The 2008 Intergenerational Writers Lab is supported by a grant from the Irvine Foundation.
About the artists
Nawaaz Ahmed is a transplant from Tamil Nadu, India where he trained in the sciences. Since moving to the United States he has been experimenting with dance, poetry, fiction, painting, photography and singing. He currently lives in San Francisco, working on his first book of long stories.
Tina Bartolome is a San Francisco native and daughter of immigrants from the Philippines and Switzerland. She writes for the page, stage and screen about everything from cultural resilience to heartbreak to her hometown. Her video shorts have screened at The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, her poetry is published in The Sistahood: On the Mic, a young adult novel by E-Fierce, and her first one-act play, 2080, opened for Jessica Hagedorn’s Fe in the Desert at Intersection for the Arts in 2007. She currently works at Oasis for Girls, serves on the School of Unity and Liberation’s Board of Directors, and is a member of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. She will begin the Creative Writing MFA program at Indiana University in Fall 2008.
Amir el-Chidiac is strongly influenced by hip hop and the traditions of Arabic poetry. Amir's poetry and prose explores issues of identity, the body, the social consciousness of political expression, the censored tongues and the bordered chorus of oppression. Amir received an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California in 2007. His work has been published in Riffrag, Mizna, and Tea Party Magazine.
Tessa Fontaine is a poet, playwright, performer and fiction writer who feels home in the Bay Area, Ghana, New York City, and Santa Barbara. She has written and performed two critically acclaimed one-woman shows in California and New York. During a year living in Ghana, Tessa worked with teenagers at a Liberian Refugee camp to create a Theatre for Development piece addressing HIV/AIDS prevention and stigmatization, and hopes to continue working in this area. A recipient of the Chilton Fellowship for Poetry and Robert G. Egan Award for Dramatic Arts, Tessa released a chapbook of poems in 2001 entitled Flight. Her plays have been performed in New York, Southern California, her living room, her parents’ living room, and many other comfy rooms nationwide.
As a teenager Joyce Futa wrote a lot of poems, some during her college years, and none at all during decades of work as an administrator and mother. She retired a few years ago and has rediscovered the pleasures and mysteries of writing poetry. She has been a participant in the Older Writers Laboratory, taught for the past three and a half years by Brent Armendinger, a group which meets weekly to practice and critique the art.
Cathlin Goulding teaches English at Newark Memorial High School, where she organizes a spoken word/poetry program for youth writers. She holds a B.A. in Literature/Writing from UC San Diego and a master’s degree in Education from UC Berkeley. She has written and performed comedic monologues in collaboration with various Bay Area arts organizations/festivals including Kearny Street Workshop's APAture, the Marsh Theater, and most recently Bindlestiff Studio's Stories High. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction about Asian Supermarkets. She lives in Oakland.
Juliana Mojica is a freelance publicist and events producer, passionate about promoting cultural arts. She has worked with many writers, musicians, filmmakers and visual artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York. Reflecting and processing through her early experiences of abandonment, she began writing about themes of love – and loss – at a very young age as a therapeutic, healthy way of healing and moving on. She has discovered this to be a life-long process, and along the way, has found a creative outlet to express herself. Juliana received her B.A. degree from UC, Berkeley in Social Sciences and Mass Communications. She has a daughter and granddaughter who inspire and teach her everyday.
Anthem Salgado is a seasoned multi-disciplinary artist/educator. A San Francisco Art Institute graduate, he has exhibited in numerous spaces including Oakland Museum of California. Salgado’s spoken word has appeared throughout New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Manila. He has shared billing with the legendary Last Poets, cutting edge author Jessica Hagedorn, and lyricist/beatboxer Radioactive of international music group Spearhead, among many others. His fiction is published in the anthology Field of Mirrors. As an actor, Salgado has performed his original solo works on the stages of Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Intersection for the Arts, and he was selected as a Young Leader of Color by Theater Communications Group to attend the National Performing Arts Convention. Salgado is a board member of Mind Power Collective, a network of Bay Area educators, and was awarded a Fulbright to the Philippines to further his skills as a teacher.
If she could, she would have majored in Rapping, but because there is no such major, Talia did the next best thing and enrolled in six years worth of creative writing classes. Talia Taylor is a recent graduate of San Francisco State University. She received two Bachelors in Arts, one of which she thought was a B.S. until she received it. She enjoys daydreaming about the space between men's shoulder blades and is already working on her acceptance speech for the 2010 Grammy nominated Best Rap Album of the Year.
Vickie Vértiz is a writer with roots in poetry, born and raised in Los Angeles. Vickie's work has been published in Mujeres de Maiz and her poem “Cuatolól” is currently featured on the Art by Latina Artists’ website. Forthcoming work includes an article in the Bay Area Guide to Independent Fashion, a chapbook of story poems called El Amor y Otros Cuentos, and I Saw My Ex at a Party: an anthology of the 2008 Intergenerational Writers Lab, the book you’re holding right now. She lives in San Francisco.
Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received a Poets & Writers grant in 2008 and was awarded the 2007 Pavel Strut Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Western Michigan. In 2006 she received the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, in the same year, a writing residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poem "Who Invited the Monkey to Omen's Party" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. She is featured on the recently released cd, WORD, with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Her work has appeared in Third Coast, The Drunken Boat, Gathering Ground: Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Reader, Meridians, Softblow, Snowvigate.com, Failbetter.com, A Gathering of Tribes, and African Voices and the AIDS/HIV Anthology, Fingernails Across A Chalkboard. Forthcoming in 2008, Eden Wall published by Factory Hollow Press.
Rui Bing Zheng is a grantwriter by day and a full-time dreamer by night. She is interested in storytelling through different genres and medium, and is currently working on a collection of essays on food and memory. Rui Bing was recently published in Hungry? SF and Kearny Street Workshop's chapbook Eating Our Words, Vol. II and her work has appeared in the Village Voice, Daily News (New York City), AsianWeek and Tooth and Nail Vol. IV: Will Work for Food and Social Justice. Her short film Over Pho premiered in San Francisco at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival June 2008. Rui Bing currently lives in Oakland, California.
Norman Antonio Zelaya was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. His parents came from Nicaragua in 1971 and settled in the Mission District. Norman grew up playing ball at the playground and joining in the barrio reindeer games, and began writing short stories under the influence of his English teacher. In graduate school, Norman met up with Darren de Leon and Paul Flores to form Los Delicados, bringing poetry to the masses and performing to critical acclaim across California and the nation. Norman has performed on stage, television and most recently in film starring in the short feature, Larrylandia, written and directed by filmmaker Karim Scarlata, and an official selection to the 2005 South X Southwest Film Festival. Norman is currently working on his first novel, a story based in his childhood barrio.
About the Intergenerational Writers Lab
The 5th Intergenerational Writers Lab (IWL) 2008 is a unique program with three of SF’s oldest arts organizations that challenges writers to thoroughly explore and develop writing. The IWL 2008 program takes place March 1 - July 16, 2008, and features workshops, public readings, and a chapbook publication. IWL workshops are led by playwrights Ricardo Bracho, poets devorah major and Truong Tran, creative nonfiction writer Bushra Rehman, journalist and music writer Jeff Chang, and journalist and blogger Annalee Newitz.
The goals of the IWL program include the following:
1) to provide local emerging writers with the opportunity to challenge, develop, and expand their writing by working with emerging and established writers in a variety of genres;
2) to contribute to the development of new literary forms and language that incorporate multiple forms of creative expression;
3) to provide emerging writers with the opportunity to connect and work with each other and with established writers in the literary world;
4) to provide the community with an opportunity to engage with new work and new explorations of form and language;
5) to contribute to the wealth of independent literary publications by publishing a new chapbook from KSW Press & Intersection for the Arts that highlights work by exciting new writers committed to exploring new forms and voices..
About the Collaborating Organizations
Kearny Street Workshop is a multidisciplinary arts organization based in San Francisco's Mission District at KSW's exhibition and arts events space, space180. The mission of Kearny Street Workshop is to produce and present art that enriches and empowers Asian Pacific American communities. Our vision is to achieve a more just society by connecting Asian Pacific American(APA) artists with community members to give voice to our cultural, historical, and contemporary issues. For more information please visit www.kearnystreet.org.
Intersection for the Arts is San Francisco's oldest alternative art space (est. 1965) and has a long history of presenting new and experimental work in the fields of literature, theater, music, dance and the visual arts, and also in nurturing and supporting the Bay Area's cultural community through service, technical support, and mentorship programs. Intersection provides a place where provocative ideas, diverse art forms, artists, and audiences can intersect one another. For more information please visit www.theintersection.org
