Claudia Castro Luna & Margaret Rhee
With Lucy Burns, Mark Marino, Sean Pessin, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell & SA Smythe
Hosted by Harold Abramowitz & Andrea Quaid
Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm
Through readings of robots, bodies, violence and love, a celebration and invocation of two new debut poetry collections by Margaret Rhee and Claudia Castro Luna.
Readers include Lucy Burns, Mark Marino, Sean Pessin, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell and SA Smythe.
Salvadorean and Korean food, along with poetry cake provided. Plus wine.
Special thanks to: Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid
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Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017) by Margaret Rhee is a collection of love poetry that humanizes our relationship with technology. This vision of an artificially intelligent future reveals and questions the contours of the human, and how robots and humans fall in and out of love.
In Claudia Castro Luna's epic poetry collection,
Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) Luna, both poetically and physically, settles spaces that were unclaimed by Latinas. Her inscription of the disappeared women of Juárez is a live cartographic image of struggle and spiritual survival." -- Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Ph.D., A Most Improbable Life, and The Runaway Poems: A Manual of Love
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Claudia Castro Luna served as Seattle’s first Civic Poet from 2015-201 and is the author of
This City (Floating Bridge Press). She is a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant and a Jack Straw Fellow. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, City Arts and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, among others. Her non-fiction work can be read in the anthologies,
The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the US, (Northwestern University Press);
Vanishing Points: Contemporary Salvadoran Narrative, (Kalina Eds) and forthcoming in
This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press). Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar. She is the author of chapbooks
Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and
Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her project
The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. Literary fellowships include Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and the Kathy Acker Fellowship. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study.
Lucy Burns’s writings on the racial politics of performance, the performance of race, the Philippines, and Filipino diaspora are published in several journals including The Dance Research Journal, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, The Asian American Literary Review, and The Writing Instructor. Her book,
Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire is published by the NYU Press (2012). As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with notable artists such as David Rousseve (choreographer and theater director), R. Zamora Linmark (writer), and TeAda Productions (theater). Among l m.s.p. b’s writing projects is
Personating Robots, Impersonating Humans, a book on the racialization of Asian/Americans as a robot race. IG: @resistancecompanions
Mark C. Marino is a writer and scholar of electronic literature living in Los Angeles. His works include “
a show of hands” (http://
hands.literatronica.net/), “
Living Will”(
http://markcmarino.com/tales/livingwill.html), and "
The Ballad of Workstudy Seth"(http://
www.springgunpress.com/the-ballad-of-workstudy-seth). His recent work includes
Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House (
http://markcmarino.com/mrsw/), a collection of interactive stories that he is writing with his children. He is the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization. (portfolio here:
http://markcmarino.com/) He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (
http://haccslab.com/), a collaboratory exploring the explication of computer source code. When he is not masquerading as Spencer Pratt or Heidi Montag on social media, Mark writes netprov and makes homemade pasta sauce in Los Angeles.
Sean Pessin has lived in Los Angeles his whole life. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from California State University, Northridge (where he teaches), and an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design. He counts among his projects agape: a journal of literary good will; Magra Books; Red Right Hand Press. His work has appeared in Interfictions Online, The New Short Fiction Series, Liminoid Magazine, and CRAG, and is always fabulous and strange and queer.
Jessica Ceballos (y Campbell) is an indige/me/xicana-afro-euskaldunak interdisciplinary artist, a community activist and advocate. Her interests are centered on exploring the liminal intersections of art and personal narrative, and how those are affected by and inform the spaces we occupy and exist in. Her written work has been published in various journals and anthologies, and she’s published two chapbooks;
Gent Re Place Ing: A Response (2016) and
End of the Road (2017). She is currently working on a collection of poetry/prose centered on a 1984 visit to Disneyland with her mother after reunification from foster care, tentatively titled,
Happiest Place on Earth.
www.jessicaceballos.com SA Smythe is a Black genderqueer writer currently living between London and LA, constantly scheming up new ways for us to get free. SA is the publishing editor for THEM - Trans Literary Journal and associate editor for Scarf Magazine. They have poetry published (and/or have work forthcoming) in phren-Z, the nines, Johannesburg Salon, Strike!, and Black Trans Love Is Trans Wealth: An Anthology. Their writing has been featured in Critical Contemporary Journal, okayafrica, and elsewhere. SA also does translation work in six languages and organises in Black queer and trans abolitionist writing collectives around the world. They are currently working on their poetry collection, tentatively titled
but do you have reparations money? Follow them on Twitter @essaysmythe.
