Out Loud: Readings & Videos
Organized with Futurepoem and Ulises
Where
Icebox Project Space
1400 N American Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122
About the event
Wendy’s Subway and Futurepoem are pleased to present a reading by Vidhu Aggarwal, Mirene Arsanios, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Jessica Laser, and Ronaldo V. Wilson in collaboration with Ulises, on the occasion of the 2022 AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs).
The program also includes a screening of recent videos by Wendy’s Subway authors JJJJJerome Ellis, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Shala Miller.
Recent/Forthcoming books
Vidhu Aggarwal, Daughter Isotope (The Operating System, 2021)
Mirene Arsanios, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022)
JJJJJerome Ellis, The Clearing (Wendy’s Subway, 2021)
Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Flag (Futurepoem, 2022)
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts (Wendy’s Subway, 2022)
Jessica Laser, Planet Drill (Futurepoem, 2022)
Shala Miller, Tender Noted (Wendy’s Subway, 2022)
Ronaldo V. Wilson, Carmelina: Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021)
About the authors
Born in Ranchi, India, Vidhu Aggarwal (she/they) grew up in the Southern U.S., primarily in Louisiana and Texas. Their multimedia works in video, poetry, and scholarship are oriented around Bollywood spectacle, carnival, and science fiction. Her collection of poems The Trouble with Humpdori (2016) received the Editor's Choice Prize from The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, was a handpicked selection with Small Press Distribution, and was selected by Sundress Publications as one of the best books of 2016. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Poetry, Leonardo, Entropy, Chicago Quarterly Review, Juked, [PANK], Pedestal, Sugar House Review, INK BRICK, Arc, Counter-Desecration, among others. A Kundiman fellow, she has worked with John Sims Projects on “The 13 Flag Funerals” in Florida, and with artist Bishakh Som on “Lady Humpadori,” a poetry/comic book collaboration. Their chapbook, Avatara, is out with Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, and their latest book, Daughter Isotope was published by The Operating System (2021). They teach poetry and postcolonial/transnational studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
Mirene Arsanios is the author of The Autobiography of a Language: Essays & Stories (forthcoming from Futurepoem), and the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She currently lives in New York.
Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet working between text, performance, and food. Jackson's writings appear in Flag + Void, HOLD, Triple Canopy, Apogee, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate at Brown University and co-organizes the Chicago Art Book Fair. Her book Flag is forthcoming from Futurepoem.
JJJJJerome Ellis is a blk disabled animal, stutterer, and artist. Through music, literature, performance, and video, he explores blkness, disabled speech, and music as forces of refusal, possibility, reparation, and healing. His diverse body of work includes contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure historical archives. JJJJJerome’s solo and collaborative work has been presented by Lincoln Center, The Poetry Project, and ISSUE Project Room (New York); MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts); REDCAT (Los Angeles); Arraymusic (Toronto); and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), among others. He is a signed artist with NNA Tapes. His work has been covered by This American Life, Artforum, Black Enso, and Christian Science Monitor. JJJJJerome collaborates with James Harrison Monaco as James & Jerome or Jerome & James. Their recent work explores themes of border crossing and translation through music-driven narratives. They have received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (they/he) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent and originally from Detroit, MI. In Fall 2020, they were appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Additionally, they are a 2020 Pew Fellow in the Arts, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2019 NPN Development Fund Awardee, 2019-21 Movement Research Artist in Residence, 2018-20 Live Feed Artist at New York Live Arts, 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellow, 2018 NEFA NDP Production Grant recipient, 2017 MAP Fund recipient, and 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. Their creative practice draws from Black study and queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. Their most recent media work Chameleon (The Living Installments) premiered virtually in April 2020. Their previous works: Séancers (2017) and the Bessie nominated #negrophobia (2015), have toured internationally, appearing in major festivals including: Tanz im August (Berlin), Moving in November (Finland), Within Practice (Sweden), TakeMeSomewhere (UK), Brighton Festival (UK), Oslo Teaterfestival (Norway), and Zürich MOVES! (Switzerland), among others. Season 1 of their interview-based podcast, American Chameleon, can be found on all podcast platforms. They are the author of two chapbooks, Animal in Cyberspace and Notes on an Urban Killfloor. Their poems and essays have been included in The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, and The Broad Street Review, among others. They lecture regularly at Stockholm University of the Arts and Exerce Masters ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.
Jessica Laser was born in Chicago. She is the author of Planet Drill (forthcoming from Futurepoem), Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions) and the chapbooks He That Feareth Every Grass Must Not Piss in a Meadow (paradigm press) and Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience (The Catenary Press). Her work has been supported by Brown University, The Iowa Writers' Workshop, The University of California, Berkeley, The Mastheads and the New Literary Project.
Shala Miller, also known by the performance moniker “Freddie June” when she sings, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. At around the age of ten or eleven, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find their way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing, acting, and singing as aids in this process. Miller holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they studied photography, film, video, and writing, and has studied under filmmaker Lucrecia Martel in Barcelona as part of La Selva’s film workshop “Sounds of Summer.” They received a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and participated in the New York Film Festival’s Artist Academy.
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose (Counterpath Press, 2014), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018); Carmelina, Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021), and a book of stories, Virgil Kills (Nightboat Books, 2022). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is, too, a mixed media artist, dancer, and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. Wilson is a recipient of fellowships from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), and Yaddo. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and is a principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies).
About Futurepoem
Futurepoem books is a New York City-based publishing collaborative dedicated to presenting innovative works of contemporary poetry and prose by both emerging and important underrepresented writers. Our rotating editorial panel shares the responsibility for selecting, designing and promoting the books we produce. Futurepoem also occasionally invites writers or multi-genre artists to produce work for special projects that is then documented in print or via other media.
About Ulises and Other Books and Co
Ulises is a project dedicated to artists’ books and independent art publications that explores the relationship between publics and publications. We provide an inventory of titles not widely distributed in the United States on contemporary art, graphic design, art theory, architecture, criticism, curatorial practice, and adjacent fields. We support people who make books and expand the boundaries of art publishing. The name Ulises is a tribute to the work and legacy of Ulises Carrión, a Mexican-born poet, conceptualist, and avant-garde artist who was an early pioneer and theorist of the artist’s book, and the founder of the Amsterdam based bookshop Other Books and So (1975–78). Ulises was founded in 2016 by Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Joel Evey, Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, and Ricky Yanas. Additional contributors include Tim Belknap, Jody Harrington, and Nabil Kashyap. This iteration of Ulises, located within Icebox Project Space, will go under the moniker “Other Books and Co” as a nod to Ulises Carrión’s Amsterdam-based storefront, Other Books and So (1975–79). In this new space, we hope to credit Carrión’s legacy and emphasize the importance of the bookshop as a site of exchange and embody the spirit and play of collectivity and collective spaces.