A special congratulations to MFA alum Hannah Lee, for winning the 2023 Birdhouse Prize from Ghostbird Press!
An independent chapbook press founded by MFA alum Peter Vanderberg, Ghostbird Press gives back to the QC community by partnering with the MFA Program to publish one chapbook submitted by a graduating MFA student, starting their post-MFA life with a publication under their belt.
Hannah’s book will come out in the spring, so stay tuned for more details on that!
November 6, 2023
5-6:30PM
Rosenthal Library, Tanenbaum Room 300i
Event Link
Light refreshments will be served.
On Black Solidarity Day, meet BlackMass Publishing and celebrate the Library’s acquisition of the BlackMass Collection.
BlackMass Publishing is an independent press promoting and publishing material by Black Artists founded by Yusuf Hassan in 2019. Combining archival photographs and found print material with poetry and jazz music, BlackMass grapples with the blurred lines and idiosyncrasies which make up the collective improvisation of African diasporic culture.
Schedule
Queens College Special Collections and Archives recently acquired a curated box of over 60 zines from BlackMass Publishing that explore politics, jazz, religion, architecture and other themes.
Sponsored by: Queens College Library Special Collections and Archives, the Queens College MFA Program, and Queens College Africana Studies, with the generous support of the Pine Tree Foundation of New York.
For more info or to make an appointment to view the BlackMass collection, please contact [email protected].
If you’re on campus, you should come talk about building a life as a writer and editor with Irene Vázquez! 12:15pm to 1:30pm in Klapper 708. (Snacks will be provided!)
BIO:
Born in New Orleans, raised in Houston, now living in Manhattan, Irene Vázquez is a queer Black Mexican American poet, editor, translator, and journalist. Their writing sits at the intersection of Black cultural work, placemaking and the environment. Irene’s debut chapbook Take Me To the Water was released by Bloof Books in October 2022. They are a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, whose work can be found in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. By day, Irene works at Levine Querido, editing books about feisty twelve-year-olds.
article by John Rice
The Brooklyn Book Festival is New York City’s largest free literary festival and connects readers with local, national, and international authors and publishers during the course of a celebratory literary week. So you had to know that folks from the QC MFA Program would be all over this diverse event, set on nurturing literary community!
So many people came out to snag copies of MFA Alum Rebecca Suzuki’s award-winning book, When My Mother is Most Beautiful, which is coming out with Hanging Loose Press in the winter. The Loose Translations Award is a collaboration between our program and Hanging Loose, one of Brooklyn’s oldest independent publishers, with the purpose of bringing more translation from across the globe into literary publishing.
Catherine LaSota participated in two events for the festival. Catherine took her new online writing community, The Resort, to her old stomping grounds at LIC Bar (the home of her previous project, the LIC Reading Series) for a discussion on what role community plays in our writing lives, called “What’s Community Got to Do with It?” She also moderated a panel on the Festival Day itself called “Echoes of Artistry,” about authors whose books embrace creativity as a character, with Brendan Slocumb, Catherine Lacey, Idra Novey, and John Wray.
MFA alum Eric Becker was also on the scene for Festival Day, moderating a panel called “History Redux and Myths Retold,” where writers challenge readers to reconsider what we think we know, whether it’s disrupting long-held belief systems or accepted historical narratives. Eric is the long-standing Senior Editor at the international literary journal Words Without Borders, as well as a prolific translator from Portuguese, has been a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, in case you were wondering how he is able to work with esteemed international authors like Carmen Boullosa (The Book of Eve), Leila Aboulela (River Spirit), and Itamar Vieira Jr. (Crooked Plow) with such ease!
This year’s Visiting Professor, Eugene Lim, had an early Festival Bookend event “Choir, Live,” where he was joined by Anelise Chen, Danny Tunick, Donald Breckenridge, and Lisa Chen in an in-gallery performative reading of his chapbook, Choir, a text that brings together ten ranting, delusional, and hallucinatory voices that arise from the exhibition’s underbelly. The chapbook is a newly commissioned text that marks the launch of Long Take, a new tri-annual series of creative writing co-published by Wendy’s Subway and Amant, taking its initial prompts from Amant’s exhibition and public events program.
And, not to be outdone, our long-time professor John Weir had a reading as well! John is the winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, which is co-sponsored by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and his winning short story collection from Red Hen Press, Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, maps the life of a gay man who has “lived through fifty years of the twin crises of global AIDS and toxic masculinity in America.” You can read more about it here on PEN America’s weekly interview series, The PEN Ten!
When people ask what is an MFA good for, this is exactly what I tell them: the things you learn here are the entrance to a larger literary community, and the more you keep pushing yourself to learn, the more likely you get a chance to see yourself in the same festivals as some of your heroes, or see your books on the same shelves as your professors!
Queens Review and our own Brainstorm reading series are co-hosting a special reading by the poet Stevie Edwards on campus. This hybrid event will feature Edwards reading from their work and answering questions, all from the comfort of Klapper 710, or the convenience of your Zoom screen!
Wednesday, October 11th
5-7PM
Klapper Hall 710
Queens College, CUNY
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Flushing, NY 11367
Zoom link to come, but we hope to see you there!
BIO:
Stevie Edwards holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of poetry collections Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press / Curbstone, 2023), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012), as well as the chapbook Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018). Edwards is currently the Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review and a Lecturer at Clemson University. In recent years, she has been a recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a VSC Fellowship from Vermont Studio Centers. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her husband and a small herd of rescue pitbulls (Daisy, Tinkerbell, and Peaches).
MFA alum Katie Machen has a new piece in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative called “The Cheese Case.”
If you’re like me, and love food writing–or food in your writing–you should go check out this gorgeous, reflective piece!
https://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2023/09/25/the-cheese-case
This just in: the Los Angeles Review of Books published a little throwback feature on our own Briallen Hopper’s first book Hard to Love, and it (of course) has a little shoutout to this fine program!
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You should go check out “What Came After Spinsters” and see for yourself!
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/klegar-archive-hopper/
Last week, Esquire published a long essay about a new emergence of literary friendships in writing. I know here at QC, we’ve always prided ourselves on collaboration and community (because we feel that creating support for your writing is the key to success) which is why we’re so glad to see this becoming more of a trend in the literary world.
And, MFA alum Catherina LaSota appears in this essay too, talking about both her writing practice and her former project of the LIC Reading Series, so this is doubly exciting!
Go check out The Rise of Literary Friendships right now!
MFA alum Catherine LaSota is taking part in the Brooklyn Book Festival’s fantastic lineup of events with this doozy:
Join The Resort writing community as we revisit the old stomping grounds of the LIC Reading Series (2015-’20). Denne Michele Norris (writer & editor-in-chief, Electric Literature), Greg Mania (Born to Be Public), and Matt Ortile (The Groom Will Keep His Name) will be in conversation with Resort & LIC Reading Series founder Catherine LaSota about the ways we have developed community online and in person. What makes a supportive community? How does community play a role in our writing lives? Audience participation is encouraged but not required. Ask questions of our panel and win raffle prizes!
LIC Bar carriage house, 45-58 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, NY 11101 – wheelchair accessible
About the event
Amant
315 Maujer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206
This reading is free to attend. RSVP here.
On the final day of Sung Tieu’s Infra-Specter, writer Eugene Lim is joined by Anelise Chen, Danny Tunick, Donald Breckenridge, and Lisa Chen in an in-gallery performative reading of Choir, a text that brings together ten ranting, delusional, and hallucinatory voices that arise from the exhibition’s underbelly.
This live reading primarily engages Sung’s new commission, Liability Infrastructure (2023) in Gallery 932 Grand, and is directed by Eugene Lim.
Choir, Live is co-organized by Amant and Wendy’s Subway and is part of Amant’s Ear to the Ground program series.
About Choir
Choir is a newly commissioned text that marks the launch of Long Take, a new tri-annual series of creative writing co-published by Wendy’s Subway and Amant, taking its initial prompts from Amant’s exhibition and public events program.
About the readers
Anelise Chen was born in Taipei and moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1990. She earned her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. from NYU. She is now Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she teaches fiction. Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Awardee. Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications such as The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Believer Magazine, BOMB, and Conjunctions. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Centre, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Her next book, Clam Down (One World Random House), based on her mollusk column for the Paris Review, will be published in 2025. She lives in New Haven with her family.
Danny Tunick performs and conducts music ranging from Pierre Boulez to hardcore punk. His performances in the rock, jazz, and experimental and classical music genres have been recorded and released on over forty record labels. He is currently most often seen performing in a dress with the band Sugarlife. Mr. Tunick would like to express his gratitude to Eugene Lim for the innumerable opportunities which Mr. Lim has granted him in this life.
Donald Breckenridge has written five novels including And Then (Black Sparrow Press 2017) and As It Falls (Ellipsis Press 2023), he has edited two fiction anthologies, and introduced the NYRB Classics edition of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove. He was the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail for nineteen years, and co-founded and co-edited InTranslation. He is currently working on a new novel.
Eugene Lim is the author of Choir and of the novels Fog & Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History. He works as a school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, New York.
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Mouth (Kaya Press) and Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and Gotham Book Prize and selected by The New Yorker, Vogue, and Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2022. She is the co-founder with Eugene Lim of the Tehching Hsieh Free Thinking Group. Born in Taipei, she now lives in Brooklyn.
