Events

• June 14, 6:00 PM

  Vernacular as Resistance

  Three Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm) Wednesdays June 14th, June 21st, June 28th Fees & Payment Options: $250 General / $220 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. *EARLY BIRD! Sign up before June 1st for $200 General / $180 AAWW Members* *STUDENT RATE for limited seats, contact Tracy Wong at twong@aaww.org for availability!* What is vernacular literature? What is its role in dismantling the oppressor’s language and assumptions? What happens to power when the oppressor co-opts the vernacular of the oppressed? And why would the oppressor want to co-opt the oppressed’s vernacular? Could it be becoz our power is embedded, encoded in our vernacular? We will explore these questions and read texts that challenge imposed ideas of hierarchy. Workshop discussion will center around Rotten English ed. Dohra Ahmed, Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen, Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, and more. Students will create original vernacular works as part of the workshop. REGISTER HERE Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. Her work appears in Apogee, Hyperallergic, the Offing, Poets & Writers, the Recluse, Winter Tangerine and elsewhere. She is the author of I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019). Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University...
  
• June 19, 7:00 PM

  The Speculative Lyric: Alternate Universes and Imagined Freedoms

  Two Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm) Mondays June 19th & June 26th Fees & Payment Options: $100 General / $80 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. *STUDENT RATE for limited seats, contact Tracy Wong at twong@aaww.org for availability!* In the introduction to the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Walidah Imarisha writes: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.” In this workshop, we will use principles of sci-fi to explore ways to engage in the speculative mode in poetry. We will conduct experiments in imagining alternate universes, talk about utopias and dystopias, and discuss what distinct possibilities the lyric can offer us in the project of envisioning freedom. REGISTER HERE Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014), which the providence Phoenix called “a thin, muscular book crackling with energy.” She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams and has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has been featured by the Huffington Post and PBS NewsHour, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Review, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She is a Project VOICE teaching artist and a member of the Dark Noise Collective for multidisciplinary artists of color. She is currently an MFA Candidate in the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and her chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press) is forthcoming. One of the things I admire most about Franny Choi’s work is the questions she asks. With her book Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014), she asks questions about power, about the fluidity and intersectionality of identity, about the many shapes that grief takes when it comes to visit, and about how it feels to perceive and be perceived by the world, amongst others. [...] Funny, heartbreaking, and unpretentiously intelligent. -Ploughshares..
  
• June 23, 7:00 PM

  Queer & Trans Spring Showcase: When the Chant Comes

  Spend the second to last Friday of Pride Month with Kay Ulanday Barrett, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, Angela Peñaredondo, & Alan Pelaez! Join us as we honor queer and trans voices, emphasize the importance of this month, and celebrate Kay’s first poetry collection When The Chant Comes (Topside Heliotrope)! Featured in The Margins and a co-host of AAWW’s Mouth To Mouth Open Mic Series, Kay joins poets and performers on stage to share timely and necessary work in a transformative Spring Showcase. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and educator, navigating life as a disabled pilipinx amerikan transgender queer in the U.S. with struggle, resistance, and laughter. When The Chant Comes (Topside Heliotrope 2016) is their first collection. K. has been invited to The White House, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, The Lincoln Center, Queens Museum, and The Chicago Historical Society to name a few. They are a fellow of both The Home School and Drunken Boat. Their contributions are found in PBS News Hour, Lambda Literary, RaceForward, Foglifter, The Deaf Poets Society, Poor Magazine, Fusion.net, Trans Bodies/Trans Selves, Winter Tangerine, Make/Shift, Third Woman Press, The Advocate, and Bitch Magazine. You can read their interview with PBS on poetry as a testimony to survival here. Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a writer and performer. She is the author of the collection of poems and art work, Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes (Switchback, 2011) and the limited edition chapbook POEMS ARE THE ONLY REAL BODIES (Bloof Books, 2013). Her second full collection of poems and artwork is YOU DA ONE (Noemi 2017, Coconut 2014). From 2010-2015, Jennif(f)er has served as the Managing Editor for Futurepoem an independent NYC press publishing contemporary poetry and prose. She is a Canto Mundo Fellow and a Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics EmergeNYC Fellow (2016). Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx/Pinoy poet and artist. She is the author of All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute 2016) and the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications 2015), and winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. She/Siya is a VONA/Voices of our Nations Art fellow, a recipient of a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Gluck Program of the Arts Fellowship, to name a few. Her work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Check out her work featured in the Margins here. Alan Pelaez is an alumni of VONA/Voices, and Culturestrike’s UndocuWriting. Their poetry and nonfiction essays are influenced by growing up Black, poor, queer, and undocumented. Alan has been published in Black Girl Dangerous, Fusion, A Quiet Courage, The Feminist Wire, and (Un)documenting, to name a few. In 2015, Alan was named one of “10 Poets for the Revolution” in the Best American Poetry Blog, and one of “10 Up And Coming Latinx Poets You Need To Know” by Remezcla. In their community organizing, Alan uses writing as a tool to address Complex PTSD. They have also taught 7th grade poetry, and facilitated after school writing workshops for high school youth. Alan is currently a contributing writer for Everyday Feminism, and collecting writing for an anthology centered on the realities of Black undocumented migrants. NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY *The space is wheelchair accessible. There are no stairs and there is a direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor. *We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free. If you have questions on reserving priority seating or any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tracy Wong at twong@aaww.org. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..