AWP Panel : Bennington Writing Seminars at Thirty
BWS 30th Anniversary Reading featuring distinguished alumni: J. Mae Barizo, Claressinka Anderson, Shawna Kay Rosenberg, and Kelly Sather. Moderated by Mark Wunderlich [Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 404AB, Level Two].
AWP Offsite Reading
The Writers Place will host an off-site happy hour and reading, co-sponsored with I-70 Review, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, New Letters, Laurel Review, Boulevard, and Bear Review. The happy hour, featuring music by River Cow Orchestra, will begin at 6:00 p.m, followed by readings at 7:00 p.m. Wine and appetizers will be available. Readers include: Felicia Zamora, Lisa Fay Coutley, Niki Herd, Janée J. Baugher, Claressinka Anderson, and Joseph Avski. This event is free and open to the public, though cash donations to The Writers Place are encouraged.
Dream House Release
Please join us Saturday, February 19th at 2pm for the launch of Dream House: A Collaborative Zine in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Womanhouse. The event will feature readings by contributors Claressinka Anderson, Sarah Green, Jennifer Pilch, Jessica Dillon and Karolina Lavergne.
The launch will be held at 4859 Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles, as part of LAND's programming for the exhibition Womanhouse. This exhibition is organized by Stefano Di Paola, Senior Director and Partner of Anat Ebgi and planned in close collaboration with the many artists participating.
Dream House marks and honors the 50th anniversary of Womanhouse. Like the destroyed physical structure of Womanhouse, the dream house is a ghost, a mirage, a utopian fantasy always in need of reconstruction. Through a collective dreaming and the use of materials old and new, we build the woman-house of today. Dream House includes the work of over ninety contributors organized into four thematic sections. Whispering Walls includes works which echo the social structures that have historically limited women’s autonomy. Body House contains renderings of the femme maison, and visceral manifestations of the body. By Her Hands considers all forms of women’s labor from mothering, housework, handiwork, and emotional labor. The final section, New Constructions, contains works that refuse easy notions of the feminine or present imaginings of utopian herlands.
Copies of the zine will be available for purchase during the launch, and online in late February.
Contact cindyrehm@gmail.com for press inquiries and further information.
Candlewood Arts Festival
SONGS OF THE SCORPION
Premiere of a three-song operatic performance
accompanied by cello and violin.
Commissioned by artist Fay Ray.
Poetry by Claressinka Anderson and music by Danielle Birrittella
Location: The Scorpion and The Grasshopper Sky Art sculptures, Galleta Meadows, Big Horn Rd. between Borrego Springs Rd. and DiGiorgio Rd., Borrego Springs, CA 92004
More information at candlewoodartsfestival.org
Prototype Festival — Magdalene
MAGDALENE
WORLD PREMIERE | CHAMBER OPERA IN 13 MOVEMENTS
This wild meditation on transformation and desire scored by the collective voices of fourteen women. Set to Marie Howe’s Magdalene poems, the opera invites an audience into the interior world of Mary Magdalene — enlarging her to cross time and space, she appears as a woman alive now, who strives to heal the unyielding split between the sacred and the sexual. Encountering her life in flashes — wandering through a hotel, lighting birthday candles, making love in the ocean — Magdalene finds transcendence in the mundane to finally become the subject of her own story.
Produced by PROTOTYPE
Magdalene is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
Program notes by Claressinka Anderson include the poem “Aubade for Magdalene” and a poet-led conversation with co-creators Danielle Birrittella and Zoe Aja Moore .