Dear all,<br><br>Just wanted to remind you that a fabulous night of *collaborative* poetry, non-fiction & visual arts will be happening tomorrow night at the (not-quite-yet-opened) Culver Center!<br><br>Hope to see you there!<br>
<br>Ching-In<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 22pt;" size="6"><i><b>Writing
the Desert </b></i></font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="5"><i><b>Literary
Reading </b></i></font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">June
4</font></font><sup><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">th</font></font></sup><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">
7-10pm </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">UCR
Culver Center of the Arts</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">3834
Main Street</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">Riverside,
CA 92501</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">RSVP
at </font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a href="mailto:sshukis@ucr.edu" target="_blank"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">sshukis@ucr.edu</font></font></a></u></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">
</font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">or
951-827-1467</font></font></p>
<p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">The
</font></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2"><i>Writing
the Desert</i></font></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">
literary reading is an extension of UCR Sweeney Art Gallery’s
collaboration with the University of California Institute for
Research in the Arts project </font></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2"><i>Dry
Immersion 3</i></font></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">
(</font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a href="http://www.sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/mappingthedesert" target="_blank"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">www.sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/mappingthedesert</font></font></a></u></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">).
</font></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2"><i>Writing
the Desert</i></font></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">
brings together writers and visual artists interested in exploring
the unique landscapes, ecologies, communities and aesthetic
possibilities of the desert, with a special attention to the desert
regions of Southern California.<br><br>The event will be a literary
reading and display of artwork created by a group of writers and
artists from Riverside during a one-month workshop and collaboration
process. Featuring the work of Ricky Abity, Maureen Alsop, Khadija
Anderson, Jackie Bang, Ching-In Chen, Nicelle Davis, Evangeline
Ganaden, Scott Hernandez, Flora Kao, K. Wallace Longshore, Leora
Lutz, Ruth Nolan, Nan Ma, Kaitlin Manry, Douglas McCulloh, Eric
Shonkwiler, Jie Tian, Juan Valdivia and Masker Walters. <br><br>The
event will be held at a limited engagement at the new UCR Culver
Center of the Arts. Because of the special nature of this event, an
RSVP is required by Thursday, 6/3 by e-mailing or calling Shane
Shukis at <a href="mailto:sshukis@ucr.edu" target="_blank">sshukis@ucr.edu</a> or 951-827-1467.<br><br>Featured Writers include:<br>MAUREEN
ALSOP is the author of two full-length collections Apparition Wren
(Main Street Rag), The Diction of Moths (Ghost Road Press,
forthcoming) and four chapbooks. She has lived in the desert oasis of
Palm Springs for the past ten years. <a href="http://www.maureenalsop.com" target="_blank">www.maureenalsop.com</a><br><br>KHADIJA
ANDERSON, writer, Butoh dancer, and MFA candidate at Antioch
University returned in 2008 to her native Los Angeles after 18 years
exile in Seattle. Khadija's poetry has been published widely in print
and online. She lives in Altadena up against the mountains and spends
much time in the desert with her family. She is a 2011 Pushcart Prize
Nominee.<br><br>JACKIE BANG is a lyric essayist who wishes she were a
detective. She has been an acoustic punk street musician, the lead
singer of a band that played one show, a waitron and an aging
bartender (gender purposefully obscured). When she is not assessing
the phonics of other people's whipper snappers as they read Little
Bear, or helping the girls, L and E, make glowing slime out of
cornstarch, she teaches detective fundamentals and empathetic poetics
at a junior college near you.<br><br>CHING-IN CHEN is the author of
The Heart's Traffic. Ching-In grew up in the land of ocean and snow
and so has acclimated to the desert by creating her own maps with
adopted community and falling in love with the desert-based creations
of artists like Noah Purifoy and Flora Kao.
<a href="http://www.chinginchen.com" target="_blank">www.chinginchen.com</a><br><br>NICELLE DAVIS has lived in many different
high desert locations. If she could, she would dress herself only
with the dirt of the southwest landscape. Her poems have appeared in
several print and online journals. She runs an online poetry workshop
at </font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a href="http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/</font></font></a></u></font><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2"><br>
<br>EVANGELINE
GANADEN is a poet whose lyrics of loss, isolation, separation and
displacement, and the courage that sustains immigrants in their
struggle for identity shape her work. She connects with the desert as
a place of contradictions, of profound beauty and desolation.<br><br>SCOTT
HERNANDEZ was raised on a small farm in southern California. His
poems have appeared in Mosaic, Spectrum, The Red Wheel Barrow,
Acentos, Cipactli, and the California Poetry collection. His new
chapbook entitled “Placasos y Retablos” is out Fall 2010.<br></font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: Arial; line-height: 15px;"><span class="il">FLORA</span> <span class="il">KAO</span>
explores the poetics of human relationship to environment. Inspired by
the shifting textures of desert landscape and urban experience, her
installations and paintings are currently on view at the Los Angeles
Art Association, See Line Gallery, and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://floratkao.blogspot.com/" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; outline-style: none; line-height: 1.2em; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153);" target="_blank"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; outline-style: none; line-height: 1.2em;">http://floratkao.blogspot.com</span></a></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">K.
WALLACE LONGSHORE is a resident of the Mount Rubidoux Manor
Retirement Community. A retired political publicist, age eighty-two,
and a bilateral below the knee amputee, he received the 2009 Mayor's
Lifetime Achievement Award from the The Mayor's Commission on Aging.
He thinks of himself as a "desert rat." For him the
American arid Southwest is a geography and landscape for greatness.
It's far horizons invite the prophetic view: it cries out for
inspired voices. The arid Southwest is the matrix from which a new
American greatness can arise.<br></font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span>LEORA LUTZ</span> is a visual artist whose work in general involves <span>the</span> dichotomy of word meaning and language in reference to people and their relationship with <span>the</span> landscape and with each other. In <span>writing</span> about <span>the</span> <span>desert</span>, she found it fraught with hope and ephemeral beauty, despite most of its permanent and obvious condition.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">NAN MA was born in Beijing and
moved to Dallas, Texas, when she was fourteen. She enjoys writing
creative essays in Chinese and would like to write a novel in
English. To her, the desert is a landscape of transformation and
poetic paradoxes.<br><br>KAITLIN MANRY is working toward her MFA in
Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. She
writes nonfiction and poetry. She has lived in Maryland, Florida,
Ohio, Zimbabwe and Washington State. This is her first
desert.<br><br>DOUGLAS MCCULLOH is a visual artist who tends to
combine images and text. His fourth book, Dream Street, was published
in 2009 by Heyday Books, Berkeley. The son of a geologist, he grew up
tramping through the deserts of the American West.<br><br>RUTH NOLAN
is a Mojave Desert native who writes poetry and prose and is editor
of "Phantom Seed," a journal of desert-based writing. She
teaches at College of the Desert, and is editor of No Place for a
Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts (Heyday Books, 2009).
She lives in Palm Desert.<br><br>ERIC SHONKWILER is a Midwestern
transplant currently living in Riverside. He writes novels, for the
most part, and is drawn to the desert for its desolate beauty,
particularly the kind that comes from the evacuation of man. <br><br>JIE
TIAN is an MFA candidate in poetry at UC, Riverside. She is working
on a collection of poems for her MFA thesis, and on a novel
tentatively titled Journey among the Ghosts. Coming from a place in
China that’s green and misty almost all-year round, she is pleased
to find — “desert is my home” here in Southern California.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Helvetica, sans-serif"><font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2">Writing
the Desert workshop is generously supported by the College of
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UC Riverside and the City of
Riverside.</font></font></p>
<p></p></div>-- <br>~~~~~<br>Ching-In Chen<br>THE HEART'S TRAFFIC (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press 2009)<br><a href="http://www.arktoi.com/books/heart.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.arktoi.com/books/heart.shtml</a><br>
<a href="http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalog" target="_blank">http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalog</a><br><a href="http://www.chinginchen.com" target="_blank">www.chinginchen.com</a><br>