Betwixt is the title of the Spring 2022 Broadside Reading Series curated by Allison Carter-Beaulé. It features six writers from various backgrounds and writing disciplines, collaborating with Center for Book Arts’ Artists-in-Residence to create a collection of limited edition letterpress-printed broadsides. Each collaboration explores the relationship of text, image, and design, incorporating the artists’ visual conveyance of writers’ poetry and prose. To celebrate these collaborative broadsides, CBA will host a two online readings by the authors accompanied by the artists they worked with.
Poets
Shyanne Figueroa Bennett is a Brooklyn poet with roots in Panama, Jamacia, and Puerto Rico. Her work has been published in various journals and. Magazines, including Green Mountains Review, Oversound, The Acentos Review, and Tribes. She graduated with an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where she was a recipient of a Chair’s Fellowship and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. Most recently, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Panama to support her creative work.
Lynn Xu Born in Shanghai, China, Lynn Xu is the author of Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn) and And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight (Wave Books), and the co-translator of Pee Poems by Lao Lang (Circumference Books). She has performed multi-disciplinary works at 300 South Kelly Street, the Guggenheim Museum, the Renaissance Society, and Rising Tide Projects. She teaches at Columbia University and coedits Canarium Books.
Shane McCrae is the author of eight books of poetry including, most recently, Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His book In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Artists
Gwen Smith is a practitioner of the Book Arts. Using the exquisite corpse of memory to reconstruct archives and find her place within the diaspora. Smith’s work grapples with identity and attempts to gain freedom by addressing the traumas inherent in that search.
Rodrigo Moreira (he/him/his) is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist creating poetic interventions on social issues that emerge in everyday life. He works on printmaking, video, text, and installation. He holds a BA in Communication Studies and a BA in Graphic Design with complementary studies in Fine Arts. Moreira was a 2019 fellow of the AIM Program of The Bronx Museum, 2018 fellow of NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program: Social Practice. During 2016-17 was a fellow of the QUEER|ART’s mentorship project and his work has been featured in selected exhibitions in Brazil, Cuba, Croatia, Spain, and the USA, such as FOUND: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, NY.
Vanessa Sandoval is a visual artist with practice in the fields of sculpture, drawing, performance, and installation. She is interested in exploring and questioning the separation between nature and culture, and how bodies are expressions of ecological relations. Sandoval uses condensation and the practice of counting as part of her creative process. Recently, she has been writing essays and doing performances that examine human ways of condensing knowledge in objects and devices such as encyclopedias, habitat dioramas, and wonder cabinets, in order to point out the ideological relations that structure our relation with the world.
Curator
Allison Carter-Beaulé is a writer, printmaker, and teacher from Calgary, Alberta. She holds a BSc in biology from the University of British Columbia, and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Columbia University where she received the Max Ritvo Poetry Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.
About the Broadside Reading Series
CBA’s Broadside Readings Series program is a unique opportunity for poets and artists to collaborate. Every spring and fall season, CBA invites a poet who previously participated in the program to select poets for a new series of readings. CBA then commissions artists to collaborate with the participating poets to design and print for each of them a limited-edition broadside featuring their work. The broadsides are made available for sale to the public in-person and online in CBA’s bookshop.
Support
This program was made possible in part with funding provided in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Live streaming on youtube now:
