EVENT: MIAMI BOOK FAIR, READING QUEER & OLYMPIA THEATER PRESENT: IN THE LOBBY LOUNGE…PARIS IS STILL BURNING
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15TH | THE OLYMPIA | 174 E. FLAGLER STREET | @ 6:00 PM |
Featuring t’ai freedom ford, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Chen Chen and sam sax.
Act I, Poetry: Inspired by the legendary documentary film Paris is Burning and the queer counterculture it documents, Paris is Still Burning (Wednesday, November 15, Olympia Theater) showcases some of the most prominent contemporary queer poets of color whose work reveals and explores various forms of social, racial, and economic injustice: t’ai freedom ford, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Chen Chen and sam sax.
Act 2, Mini Ball: The reading will be followed by a mini “ball”— a mix between a drag pageant and a queer performance competition — featuring members of South Florida’s own ballroom scene competing in four different categories: runway, vogue, arms control and best dressed. This last category will be open for the entire audience to participate. A plaque and a cash prize of $100 will be awarded in each of the 4 categories.
**Paris Is Still Burning was originally produced by Patricia Smith at AWP 2015, Minneapolis.
Special thank you to our programming partner, Reading Queer, and to Paris is Still Burning producing partner, The Olympia Theater, Downtown Miami’s Historic Performing Arts Center. Sponsored by Miami Dade County, Culture Builds Florida, Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority.
Wednesday, November 15th 2017. Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm. Location: Olympia Theater. 174 E. Flagler Street. Miami, FL 33131 Cost: Free & open to the public. *NOTE: doors open at 6:00 pm. Event will start promptly at 6:30 pm. Parking: free. Simply head to the MDC garage, building 7. RSVP below…
CHEN CHEN was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Lambda Literary. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. He lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD at Texas Tech University.
Media: Favorite Poem Project: “To Autumn” by John Keats”.
Author: Yrsa Daley-Ward
Most Current Book: Bone
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Book Blurb: From the celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, a poignant collection of poems about the heart, life, and the inner self. Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence—so clear and pared-down, they become universal. From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonate to the core of what it means to be human.
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She splits her time between London and Los Angeles.
Author: t’ai freedom ford
Most Current Book: how to get over
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Book Blurb: how to get over is part instruction manual, part prayer, part testimony. It attempts to solve the reader’s problems (by telling them how to get over), while simultaneously creating them – troubling the waters with witness and blues. ford’s poems witness via a series of “past life portraits” that navigate personal space as well as the imagined persona. These portraits conjure the blues via the imagined lives of the inanimate (a whip, a machete), the historic (a Negro burial ground, Harriet Tubman, The Red Summer), the iconic (Pecola Breedlove, Richard Pryor, Rodney King). At the same time, these portraits focus on the past lives of the author and grapple with themes including sexuality, sexual abuse, and substance abuse.
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shocklee. She is a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and a 2015-16 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow sponsored by The Poetry Project. t’ai lives in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at: shesaidword.com
Author: sam sax
Most Current Book: Madness
Publisher: Penguin Books
About Madness: In this powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.
sam sax is a queer jewish educator & writer. He’s the author of Madness (Penguin 2017) the winner of The National Poetry Series selected by Terrance Hayes. His second book Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) is the Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poems. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, & The MacDowell Colony. He’s the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion & author of four chapbooks. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, The American Literary Review Prize, & his poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Tin House + other journals. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press.A
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