[CW-Grad] Writing the Desert reading tomorrow night!

[Ching-In Chen]

Dear all,

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!

Hope to see you there!

Ching-In

  *Writing the Desert *

*Literary Reading *


 June 4th 7-10pm

UCR Culver Center of the Arts

3834 Main Street

Riverside, CA 92501


 RSVP at *sshukis at ucr.edu*

or 951-827-1467

The *Writing the Desert* literary reading is an extension of UCR Sweeney Art
Gallery’s collaboration with the University of California Institute for
Research in the Arts project *Dry Immersion 3* (*
www.sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/mappingthedesert*). *Writing the
Desert*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.

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.

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
sshukis at ucr.edu or 951-827-1467.

Featured Writers include:
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. www.maureenalsop.com

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.

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.

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. www.chinginchen.com

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 *http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/*

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.

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.

FLORA KAO 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 http://floratkao.blogspot.com

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.

LEORA LUTZ is a visual artist whose work in general involves the dichotomy
of word meaning and language in reference to people and their relationship
with the landscape and with each other.  In writing about the desert, she
found it fraught with hope and ephemeral beauty,  despite most of its
permanent and obvious condition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


 Writing the Desert workshop is generously supported by the College of
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UC Riverside and the City of
Riverside.

-- 
~~~~~
Ching-In Chen
THE HEART'S TRAFFIC (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press 2009)
http://www.arktoi.com/books/heart.shtml
http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalog
www.chinginchen.com
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