Birds of Lace at CUNY Chapbook Festival + more

I hope this Spring finds you all well and surrounded by florals and faunas. A few bits of news:

-Fabulous Essential author Niina Pollari is reading tomorrow night in NYC as part of the Perfect Sense Reading Series with Kadija Sesay, Margaret Diehl, and Victoria Lynne McCoy. The event takes place at the Cornelia St. Cafe (29 Cornelia Street) at 6pm.

-Birds of Lace will have a table this coming Friday 3/30 at the CUNY Chapbook Festival; if you’re there stop by our table and say hello.

-Submissions for our 2012 chapbookbook reading period end on 3/31! View guidelines here.

-Another things ending 3/31 is our March shop special: free shipping on all U.S. orders. Visit our etsy shop and fill your brain to the brim with words.

-Lauren Spohrer has created a new online journal promoting work by women called Two Serious Ladies. Peruse and adore work by Kate Zambreno, Roxane Gay, Anne Marie Rooney and many others, and submit your work!

-Heels on Wheels in a traveling roadshow, and in their own words, “a dazzling cabaret of performance art works and acts of resistance by queer folks on femme/inine spectrum genders.” They’re raising money for their upcoming tour on kickstarter- contribute if you can!

-Kristen Stone has a new chapbook/zine press called Unthinkable Creatures. Their first release is i love crushes more than the real thing, which I love because it is the real thing: honest, sweet, strange, beautiful. Unthinkable Creatures is open for submissions so send ‘em your work and send ‘em your love.

xox

Upcoming Rohin Guha and Jason Helm reading + some

Hello all,

This coming Saturday 2/25, in Brooklyn, both Jason Helm (Fetish) and Rohin Guha (Relief Work) will be reading at the Slapdash reading series. Click the link for more info; rumor has it Rohin will be raffling off some copies of Relief Work, and Jason will have copies of Fetish on hand to sell you.

AWP is coming up! There are a hundred million readings to tell you about. As the time comes closer- aka later this week- I will post a list of not-to-miss readings, including a few from our own Anna Joy Springer and Carrie Murphy, who will be a part of our jointly hosted event on 3/1 with Action Books and Kate Durbin.

Speaking of Carrie Murphy, you can now pre-order her gorgeous, astonishing first book Pretty Tilt ( from Keyhole Press) here, which you should really, really do. Trust.

A Birds of Lace favorite, Mica Sigourney, has a new performance premiering in SF in March. It’s called Masterwork and you can learn more about it here. Mica does phenomenal, genre-bending, avant-drag as Vivvyanne Forevermore!, often showcased at his weekly party in SF called Something. Mica is also a beautiful, heart-rending writer; I am awed by his recent contribution to offcenter.org’s series of posts on queer economy, which was be found here.

Hope the month of Pisces is treating you well so far.

xo

This Week’s To-Dos

Tonight in Brooklyn Niina Pollari, author of Fabulous Essential, will be reading poems and bringing some multimedia excitingness into the mix. The event, focusing on art from Scandanavia, begins at 8pm. More details here

On Friday night, also in Brooklyn, Relief Work author Rohin Guha will be emceeing Earshot, an excellent reading series curated by Nicole Steinberg. Featured that night are Helen Phillips, Micaela Mascialino, Sean Edgley, Anna Voisad and the fantastic Jason Helm, who also read at the Relief Work launch party.

On the West Coast I recommend going to see Jason Fritz Michael’s new show This is How We Do It, currently up at As Is Exhibitions in Oakland. From the As Is website:

“Fritz’s 2011 solo show with As Is Exhibitions, “This is How We Do It” serves as a meditation on fear and comfort, healing and sickness, mind and body, past and future, make believe and reality. Using the vast media culture of the late 1980s and early 90s, which conflated queerness with illness, Fritz provides a counter-reading of these images from our current moment.

For queers, and many others, HIV/AIDS created a fear of ones own body as the promise of a future was thrown into jeopardy. As AA Bronson has pointed out this historical moment was “the continuous interweaving of care-taking, funerals, memorials, anniversaries, and more deaths.“ Indeed, death as a way of life, this work asks if we can change this trajectory already assumed by history. And if we can change our bodies and futures into something not tethered to the chains of death.

Let go of the fear and get better, let positive thinking cure and experience pure joy. -Eric Stanley”

For more information, please visit the As Is website.

Coming up in a week, Jason Fritz Michael and Eric Stanley will have a collaborative installation and related film show at San Francisco’s ATA:

“Necrocapital is an installation created by Eric Stanley and Jason Fritz that brings together the HIV/AIDS pandemic, global capital, and the work of death. In conversation with the ghosted histories of AIDS art and current writing on biopolitics, we question our silent cohabitation of a world where life is predicated upon access to cash. Through the abundance of American deco design and the everydayness of medication, Necrocapital wants to more than aestheticize the death-worlds of pharmaceutical accumulation, it seeks to obliterate them.

Installation April 14- May 31, 2011
Film program May 26, 2011 7pm

Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110

Jason Fritz is an interdisciplinary artist whose work shuttles between performance, installation, and disaster.

Eric Stanley is a filmmaker, academic, and radical queer activist currently organizing with Gay Shame and Critical Resistance.”

*I’m going to start posting more non-BoL related (but BoL favorited!) events and recommendations here, because there is always so much exciting, brilliant art and literature happening that I feel Birds of Lace is some sort of sister to- a constellation of inspiration.