Wendy's Subway / Reading Room / Bard Graduate Center 2017

Wendy's Subway Reading Room
March 24 - July 30, 2017

Bard Graduate Center
18 W. 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
www.bgc.bard.edu

Hours:
Tue, Fri-Sun: 11am-5pm
Wed-Thurs: 11am-8pm

As artists-in-residence, Wendy’s Subway is pleased to present a Reading Room, in conjunction with Bard Graduate Center’s Focus Project exhibitions: New York Crystal Palace 1853 and Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli tu.

The Reading Room at Bard Graduate Center promotes community engagement with artists’ books, periodicals, and other publications selected by Wendy’s Subway for their relationship to the spring exhibitions and public programs.

Originally designed by Tyler Polich and Hannah Wilentz, the Wendy's Subway Reading Rooms have previously been installed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); White Columns (New York); NADA New York (with Aeromoto, Mexico City); Brown University, (Providence, RI); and the Carnegie Mellon University School of the Arts (Pittsburgh, PA).

Every month, on select Wednesdays from April through July, poets and writers based in New York and across the country will read new work, variously engaging with titles in the collection and its guiding theme, "ritual and capital." Scroll down for a schedule of upcoming events.

A free limited edition newspaper catalog of the Reading Room collection is available on site.

Over the course of the residency Wendy’s Subway is also seeking submissions for an upcoming publication which will address the potential of ritual under capital. View the call for submissions here.

PROGRAMS

Wendy’s Subway is pleased to present a monthly reading series in conjunction with the Reading Room at Bard Graduate Center. On select Wednesdays from April through July, poets and writers based in New York and across the country will read new work, variously engaging with titles in the collection and its guiding theme, “ritual and capital.”

Doors and refreshments at 6:30pm, readings at 7pm.

Wednesday, April 26
Readings by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Layli Long Soldier, and Wendy Xu

Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, The Brooklyn Rail, Eleven Eleven and Mud City, among others. She is a recipient of the NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship and the Whiting Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, NM.

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, 2009). Julian is a singer with the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits drum, and the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country bands Juan & the Pines (NYC) and The Western Skyline (Oakland). Currently in Queens, NY, Julian also sometimes lives in California.

Wendy Xu is the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017) and You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013), which was profiled by Poets & Writers magazine as one of that year’s best debuts. In 2011 she was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, and received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She has taught at The New School, the Creative Writing MFA Program at Columbia University, and New York University. She is Poetry Editor for Hyperallergic.

Wednesday, May 10
Readings by Chris Nealon, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Ada Smailbegović, and Jackie Wang

Chris Nealon teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), and three books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009) and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal has published four chapbooks: Burning Questions? (Gauss PDF), Ri Ri (Re)Vision (Publication Studio), This Is The ENDD (Wilner Books), and Close (Sibling Rivalry Press). She has performed at venues including the New Museum (New York), REDCAT, and the McDonald’s on Sunset and Fountain (Los Angeles). Her writings on art have appeared in Artforum, X-tra Arts Quarterly, and Rhizome, but most frequently in Art in America. She edits the Art Los Angeles Reader, a free, biannual newsprint. Her first book, a nonfiction novel about the Americana in Glendale, California, is forthcoming with Penny Ante Editions.

Ada Smailbegović was born in Sarajevo and now resides between New York, Vancouver, and Providence. She is an assistant professor of English at Brown University and holds a degree in Biology from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from NYU. Her writing explores relations between poetics, non-human forms of materiality, and histories of description. She is a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Critical and poetic work includes Avowal of What Is Here (JackPine Press, 2009), Of the Dense and Rare (Triple Canopy, 2013), “Some Disordered Interior Geometries” (Reanimation Library; The Volta, 2015), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene, 2015), and an article on animal architecture and the affective ethology of Monk Parakeets (Angelaki, 2015). She is currently at work on a critical-theoretical book entitled Poetics of Liveliness: Natural Histories of Soft Materials in 20th and 21st Century Poetry and a poetry chapbook, The Forest / or (On Waiting), is forthcoming from Doublecross Press.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (Capricious) and the essay collection Carceral Capitalism (forthcoming from Semiotexte). Find her @LoneberryWang and loneberry.tumblr.com.

Wednesday, June 14
An evening of readings organized by the annual journal Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, with a special presentation of A Fiery Flying Roule. Featuring Andrea Lawlor, Matt Longabucco, Miranda Mellis, and Eirik Steinhoff.

Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe (PM Press)
As the serial disasters of capitalism’s current crisis—economic, political, environmental—continue to batter the world, Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe is a device for recording, analyzing, and transmitting events as they happen. But it offers neither dire predictions nor false hopes. Instead, it embraces the mystery of what might transpire. The word “catastrophe” has not always signified “disaster”; during the sixteenth century, especially in theater, it came to mean “a reversal of what is expected.” Black Boxis ultimately a documentary project, a record of the catastrophe, but it’s an open question where the inquiry will take us. It may be a record of the disastrous end. Or it may be a record of the turning.

A Fiery Flying Roule (first circulated circa Occupy Oakland; forthcoming from Station Hill Press)
What is the rule of crisis? What role might we play in the metamorphosis? What might we contribute to a movement’s momentum—to keeping it on a roll? A roule is an experimental response to these questions. Using the permissions of the commonplace book, on the one hand, to yoke heterogeneous materials together, and the potential of poetry, on the other, as a uniquely responsible medium in which one might, as Robert Duncan once suggested, “keep | the ability to respond,” A Fiery Flying Roule is both a call and a response to a collective attempt to figure out new forms of belonging together as well as forms fit for communicating these new forms.

Bios

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (forthcoming from Rescue Press in November 2017).

Matt Longabucco is the author of the chapbooks The Sober Day (DoubleCross Press, 2016) and Everybody Suffers: The Selected Poems of Juan García Madero (O’Clock Press, 2014). He is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, an independent library and meeting space for writers, artists, and readers. He teaches at New York University and Bard College, and lives in Brooklyn.

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications, forthcoming from Solid Objects. Other books include The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist.

Eirik Steinhoff is a member of the Black Box Collective. He lives in Olympia, WA.

Wednesday, July 12
Feliz Lucia Molina, Judah Rubin, and Danniel Schoonebeek

Feliz Lucia Molina is a poet, editor, and co-organizer of Desert Poetry in Joshua Tree, California. Her books and chapbooks include Undercastle (Magic Helicopter Press, 2013), The Wes Letters (Outpost19, 2014), Crystal Marys (Scary Topiary Press, 2016), and Roulette (forthcoming), and her work has appeared in PEN America, SF MOMA Open Space, Gauss PDF, Fence, Jacket2, Night Papers, and elsewhere. She is currently based in Chicago.

Judah Rubin is a poet living in Queens.

Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet, a 2015 National Poetry Series selection published by University of Georgia Press in 2016. A recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, recent work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.