Wednesday, April 23
Intergenerational Writers Lab Night 2
with Annalee Newitz and Truong Tran
and IWL 2008 participants
A collaboration of Kearny Street Workshop and Intersection for the Arts
Join Kearny Street Workshop and Intersection for the Arts for an evening of literary exploration and the second night of the 2008 Intergenerational Writers Lab (IWL). The evening features readings by two IWL lead artists, blogger and tech writer Annalee Newitz and poet Truong Tran, and IWL 2008 participants Nawaaz Ahmed, Tina Bartolome, Amir el-Chidiac,Talia Taylor, Arisa White, Rui Bing Zheng, and Norman Zelaya.
Left: IWL 2008 graphic design by Kelly Biele
Date: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Time: 7 -9 pm
Location: Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia Street, @ 16th Street, san francisco
Cost: $5 - 15 sliding scale.
The 2008 Intergenerational Writers Lab is supported by a grant from the Irvine Foundation.
About the Artists
Annalee Newitz is a blogger and journalist based in San Francisco. She has a weekly syndicated column called Techsploitation, which is about the ways that media mutates and reiterates the problems of everyday life. Formerly, she was the culture editor at The San Francisco Bay Guardian and in 2002 I was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, which allowed her to spend the 2002-2003 academic year as a research fellow at MIT. Her work has appeared in magazines and papers such as Wired, New York Magazine, Popular Science, New Scientist, Salon, SecurityFocus, The Industry Standard, GettingIt, Feed, Gear, Nerve, The Utne Reader Online, Alternative Press Review, New York Press, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Silicon Valley Metro, and several academic journals and anthologies. For more information please visit http://www.techsploitation.com
Truong Tran received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his MFA at San Francisco State University. He is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Arts Council of Santa Clara, the California Arts Council, the Creative Work Fund and The San Franciso Arts Commission. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals including ZYZZYVA, The American Voice, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) and The North Dakota Quarterly. He is the author of three collections of poetry including Placing The Accents, The Book of Perceptions and dust and concscience which recently received the Poetry Center Book Award. Truong is currently living in San Francisco and teaching poetry at San Francisco State University, Mills College, and elsewhere.
Nawaaz Ahmed is a transplant from Tamil Nadu, India where he trained in the sciences. Since moving to the United States he has been experimenting with dance, poetry, fiction, painting, photography and singing. He is currently working on his first book of long stories.
Tina Bartolome is an SF native and daughter of immigrants from the Philippines and Switzerland. She writes for the page, stage and screen about everything from cultural resilience to heartbreak to her hometown. Her video shorts have screened at The SF Int'l Asian American Film Festival, her poetry is published in "The Sistahood: On the Mic,” a young adult hip hop novel by E-Fierce and her first one-act play, "2080", opened for Jessica Hagedorn's "Fe in the Desert" at Intersection for the Arts in 2007. She serves on the School of Unity and Liberation's Board of Directors and as a member of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. She will be leaving home for the first time ever this Fall to attend the Creative Writing MFA program at Indiana University.
Amir el-Chidiac is strongly influenced by hip hop and the traditions of Arabic poetry. Amir's poetry and prose explores issues of identity, the body, the social consciousness of political expression, the censored tongues and the bordered chorus of oppression. Amir recently received an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California. Amir's work has been published in Riffrag, Mizna, and Tea Party Magazine. He has most recently performed at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Galeria de La Raza and the SOMARTS Bay Gallery.
Talia Taylor is a recent graduate of San Francisco State University. She received two Bachelor's in Arts, one of which she thought was a B.S. until she received it. She enjoys writing and performing her poetry and is working on being less shy.
Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was awarded the 2007 Pavel Strut Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Western Michigan. In 2006 she received the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, in the same year, a writing residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poem "Who Invited the Monkey to Omen's Party" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. Her work has appeared in Third Coast, The Drunken Boat, Gathering Ground: Cave Canem 10th Anniversary Reader, Meridians, Softblow, Snowvigate.com, Failbetter.com, A Gathering of Tribes, and African Voices and the AIDS/HIV Anthology, Fingernails Across A Chalkboard. Forthcoming in fall 2008 is her chapbook For Give Her published by Factory Hollow Press. She currently lives in Oakland, California.
Norman Antonio Zelaya was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. His parents came from Nicaragua in late 1971 and settled in the Mission District. Norman grew playing ball at the playground and joining in the barrio reindeer games that would later influence his writing. He began writing short stories under the influence of his English teacher.In graduate school, Norman met up with Darren de Leon and Paul Flores to form Los Delicados. They trailblazed a path to the stage with their message of bringing poetry to the masses in a form that celebrated all that lyric and performance had to offer. Los Delicados performed to critical acclaim all over California and spots across the nation. Norman has performed on stage, television and most recently in film starring in the short feature, Larrylandia, written and directed by filmmaker, Karim Scarlata. It was an official selection to the South X Southwest Film Festival in 2005. Now, Norman is working on his first novel, a story based in his childhood barrio. He continues to share his work at open mics, and was recently accepted into the Intergenerational Writers' Lab, a collaboration of Kearny Street Workshop and Intersection for the Arts.
Rui Bing Zheng is a grantwriter by day and a fulltime dreamer by night. She is interested in storytelling through different genres and medium, and is currently working on a collection of essays on food and memory. Rui Bing has recently been published in Hungry? SF and her short film Over Pho will premiere at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival this June. She currently lives in Oakland, California.
About the Intergenerational Writers Lab
The 5th Intergenerational Writers Lab (IWL) 2008 is a unique program with three of SF’s oldest arts organizations that challenges writers to thoroughly explore and develop writing. The IWL 2008 program takes place March 1 - July 16, 2008, and features workshops, public readings, and a chapbook publication. IWL workshops are led by playwrights Ricardo Bracho, poets devorah major and Truong Tran, creative nonfiction writer Bushra Rehman, journalist and music writer Jeff Chang, and journalist and blogger Annalee Newitz.
The goals of the IWL program include the following:
1) to provide local emerging writers with the opportunity to challenge, develop, and expand their writing by working with emerging and established writers in a variety of genres;
2) to contribute to the development of new literary forms and language that incorporate multiple forms of creative expression;
3) to provide emerging writers with the opportunity to connect and work with each other and with established writers in the literary world;
4) to provide the community with an opportunity to engage with new work and new explorations of form and language;
5) to contribute to the wealth of independent literary publications by publishing a new chapbook from KSW Press & Intersection for the Arts that highlights work by exciting new writers committed to exploring new forms and voices..
About the Collaborating Organizations
Kearny Street Workshop is a multidisciplinary arts organization based in San Francisco's Mission District at KSW's exhibition and arts events space, space180. The mission of Kearny Street Workshop is to produce and present art that enriches and empowers Asian Pacific American communities. Our vision is to achieve a more just society by connecting Asian Pacific American(APA) artists with community members to give voice to our cultural, historical, and contemporary issues. For more information please visit www.kearnystreet.org.
Intersection for the Arts is San Francisco's oldest alternative art space (est. 1965) and has a long history of presenting new and experimental work in the fields of literature, theater, music, dance and the visual arts, and also in nurturing and supporting the Bay Area's cultural community through service, technical support, and mentorship programs. Intersection provides a place where provocative ideas, diverse art forms, artists, and audiences can intersect one another. For more information please visit www.theintersection.org
