Fall Chapbook/Zine Series Launch
Join us for our the launch of new chapbooks by former Wendy's Subway Fellows: The River by Harris Bauer, radio fantasmal/fantasy radio by Noa Mendoza, and Ad Học by Teline Trần. Trần will be accompanied by a đàn tranh (Vietnamese zither) performance by Ngô Thanh Nhàn. The Fellowship Program at Wendy’s Subway invites recipients to publish new manuscripts in digital format and print. Publications range from poetry chapbooks to essays and artist books.
This event will take place in-person at Wendy's Subway. Masks are highly recommended in our reading room and are provided on-site. For any accommodation requests, please contact info@wendyssubway.com.
About the books
Harris Bauer's The River tells the story of a newly visible stream running through a city. The insistence of the body of water becomes of extreme fascination to the narrator, who lives suspended between restlessness and routine. As the river grows, filling lakes, ponds, and cracking parking lots, both scientists and community wonder at the current’s arrival. In turn, the narrator asks no questions at all. She reverts to hypotheses and desire, her attention absorbed by the river.
Noa Mendoza’s radio fantasmal/fantasy radio is an exercise in experimental mistranslation—between Buenos Aires and New York, Spanish and English, text and life. In their first chapbook, Mendoza questions, deepens, and obfuscates the relationship of the translator to the poet by staging a dialogue with the work of Argentine poet Violeta Sticotti. As one tries to understand the other’s grief through a close reading of their poems, the inarticulable reveals its own meta-text. This book finds poetry in the lapses of the untranslatable, meaning where language shouldn’t go. Mendoza turns a dial and tunes in to a mourning record, to a ghost slippage—a fantasy radio.
Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.
About the readers
Harris Bauer is a writer and editor living between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. She has worked on editorial projects and initiatives with Wendy’s Subway, Ugly Duckling Presse, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and is the editor of the monthly wine zine, Visions. Her work has appeared in American Chordata, Ginger, and Sentiments: Expressions of Cultural Passage (Press Press). With Rachel Zaretzky, she co-runs Hosting Projects, a currently dormant curatorial initiative. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies, and is currently studying archival methods around historical memory and personal collections through the MA/MLIS dual-degree program at New York University and Long Island University.
Noa Mendoza is a poet based in New York working in interdisciplinary experimental translation. Noa is the Editorial Assistant at Seven Stories Press and an A/V Manager at The Poetry Project.
Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx.
Ngô Thanh Nhàn, Ph.D. Linguistics, is a research scholar of the Linguistic String Project at the New York University and a fellow of Nôm Studies and Folk Music Studies at the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture & Society. Dr. Nhàn is a board member of The Institute for Vietnamese Culture and Education, Mekong NYC, and Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign. He has been teaching Vietnamese Đàn Tranh Ensemble at Folk Arts – Cultural Treasure Charter School in Philadelphia, and Mekong NYC hosted Đàn Tranh Folk Music by Yes We Can Music, LLC. He is a core member of VietLeft Power since 2021.