Broadside Reading Series: Spring 2020 III
The Spring season of CBA’s Broadside Reading Series was curated by Asiya Wadud, featuring six poets across writing backgrounds & disciplines. Originally scheduled to take place in May 2020, this reading was postponed after the murder of George Floyd demanded immediate action from artist’s and writers across the nation.
The series brings poets and CBA’s Artists-in-Residence together to create a collection of collaborative broadsides. Each collaboration uniquely explores the relationship of text, image, and design, incorporating the artists’ visual conveyance of each writers’ poetry or prose.
This evening’s reading features writers Anaïs Duplan & Zahra Patterson. Following the readings, the six broadside artists from the spring season will reveal their designs and share a few words about their design process. The production of broadsides have been delayed due to the Center’s closure following the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Poets
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and the Bettering American Poetry anthology. Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2020. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He now works as Program Manager at Recess and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Poetry at Columbia University.
Anaïs Duplan’s broadside was designed by Devin Morris.
Zahra Patterson is a writer and educator. Her polyvocal, fragmented essay Chronology (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Memoir/Biography. She is the creator of Raw Fiction, a one-time (twice done) youth literary arts project. Her work has been supported by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Mount Tremper Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Pratt Center. She earned an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and lives in Pennsylvania with her elderly dog.
Zahra Patterson’s broadside was designed by Claudia Cortinez.
Curator
Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope and the forthcoming No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist-in-residence and a 2020 Danspace Project PLATFORM writer-in-residence. Recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Social Text Journal, FENCE and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School.
