Friday, February 22: Gabrielle Civil's Experiments in Joy Book Launch

Join us as we celebrate the release of Gabrielle Civil's second memoir Experiments in Joy.

EXPERIMENTS IN JOY
with
Gabrielle Civil
Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle
Jess Arndt
& Madhu H. Kaza 

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Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

 
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Gabrielle Civil’s Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.

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GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original solo and collaborative performance works around the world engaging race, body, art, politics, grief, and desire. Since 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. She is the author of Swallow the Fish and Tourist Art (with Vladimir Cybil Charlier). Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Obsidian, Aster(ix), Rain Taxi, and more. She teaches Creative Writing & Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

KENYATTA A.C. HINKLE is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, educator and performer. Her artwork and performances of experimental texts have been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Huffington Post and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in Not That But This, Obsidian and Among Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. She is the author of the artist book Kentifrications: Convergent Truth(s) and Realities (Occidental College/Sming Sming Books) and SIR, her first book of poetry, a reflection on naming as a tool for undefining the defined (Litmus Press). Hinkle is assistant professor of painting at University of California, Berkeley.

JESS ARNDT was born in Washington State, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Jess received an MFA at Bard and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. Jess has written for Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, and the art journal Parkett, among others. Jess is a co-founder of New Herring Press. Jess’ debut collection of short stories, LARGE ANIMALS was published in 2017 by Catapult Press. She is Visiting Faculty in Creative Writing this year at the California Institute of the Arts.

MADHU H. KAZA was born in Andhra Pradesh, India and is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the co-editor of an issue of Aster(ix) Journal entitled What We Love and editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connections between translation and migration. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chimurenga, Gulf Coast, The New Inquiry, Waxwing, and more. She is a founding member of the No.1 Gold artist collective.