Critics’ Pick: The First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series!

We’re very happy to be a TimeOutNY “Critics’ Pick” for this Monday’s reading.  Join us at Shrine this September 10, 7pm to hear Paul La Farge, Lynne Tillman, and art duo LoVid read and perform new work.  If you’re not already familiar with their innovative work, you might want to browse the following links.  You can find Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes here.  It’s a rich, funny, and searching hypertext (and print book!) about the disconnect between human knowledge and human action, and it’s a pleasure to explore online.   Lynne Tillman’s work is being published and reprinted by the exciting new press Red Lemonade.  You can view her catalogue and a fabulous cache of her short prose here.  LoVid recently led a walking tour in Harlem involving dancers, local history, video, and iPhones; you can see more of that project here and the extraordinary breadth of their work here.

One Week Until the First Person Plural Harlem Season Premiere!

We’re very excited to hear Lynne Tillman, Paul La Farge, and artist duo LoVid perform one week from today at Shrine (7pm on Monday, September 10th at Shrine).  We’ve been re-reading Lynne Tillman’s miniature masterpieces, in everything from her latest Someday This Will Be Funny (which the NYTimes calls “gorgeously at ease, technically virtuosic [and]…ever on point,” to her witty and unsettling collaboration with artists This Is Not It.  You can sample a piece from Someday This Will Be Funny here: The Substitute.  We can’t wait to hear her live and see you there!

Check Out Our Poster for the September 10th Reading!

Thanks to Natalie Molina for our new First Person Plural Harlem posters.  Our co-founder Stacy Parker Le Melle takes photographs all over Harlem and Natalie turns them into art!  We love how Natalie brings out the complex textures of our neighborhood (check out her designs at http://pistoladesign.com).  Natalie has designed all of our posters so far, and she’ll be rolling out a new design for each of the four FPP readings this season.  Check back for more great visuals!  And mark your calendars: the first FPP reading of the season will be at Shrine on September 10th, featuring Paul La Farge, art duo LoVid, and Lynne Tillman.

Our Next Reading is on Monday, April 23 at 7pm

We are holding our second FPP Harlem Reading at Shrine next Monday night 4/23 at 7pm featuring playwright Bathsheba Doran; former editor of The Believer and novelist Ed Park; and short story writer Tiphanie Yanique.

Writers will read from their body of work and new pieces exploring the plural voice. Join us for this one-of-a-kind evening!  It’s FREE and there’s a cash bar.  You will find us at: Shrine World Music Venue, located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. Harlem, NY http://www.shrinenyc.com/

Our Readers for 4/23: Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, and Tiphanie Yanique

We are thrilled to announce the readers for our second FPP Harlem event: Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, and Tiphanie Yanique.

Bathsheba Doran’s plays include KIN (Playwrights Horizons), Parents’ Evening (Flea Theater); Living Room in Africa (Off-Broadway for Edge Theater); Nest (commissioned and produced by Signature Theater DC); Until Morning (BBC Radio 4); adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations, The Blind and Peer Gynt; and her play for young audiences, Ben and The Magic Paintbrush (South Coast Rep). She is a recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, three Lecomte du Nouy Lincoln Center playwriting awards, a Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellow as and a Susan Blackburn Award finalist. Her work has been developed by MTC, the O’Neill Theatre Center, Lincoln Center, Sundance Theater Lab, and Playwrights Horizons. Ms. Doran studied at Cambridge and Oxford universities before working as a television comedy writer with the BBC.  She is currently under commission from Atlantic Theater and Playwrights Horizons, and Schtanhaus in London. Her work is available from Samuel French and Playscripts Inc.  She has adapted The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency for HBO Films and wrote on Season Two of the acclaimed Martin Scorsese/HBO Series BOARDWALK EMPIRE, for which one of her episodes received a WGA nomination.

Ed Park is the author of the novel PERSONAL DAYS, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He is a former editor of The Believer and the Voice Literary Supplement and is currently the literary fiction editor for Amazon Publishing.  For more information on Ed Park, visit here.

 

Tiphanie Yanique’s story collection HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY was published by Graywolf Press in 2010.  She is a fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing, the Boston Review Fiction Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Prize in Fiction. Her fiction, poetry or essays can be found in the Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, and other journals and anthologies. She has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers. Tiphanie is a professor of Creative Writing  at The New School University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York.  For more information on Tiphanie Yanique, visit here.

Join us Monday, April 23, 2012 @ 7 pm

Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
Harlem, NY
http://www.shrinenyc.com/

Opening Event: March 5, 2012 @ 7pm

Harlem, NEW YORK—The FPP Harlem Collective hosts the opening reading in the First Person Plural Reading Series at the Shrine World Music Venue, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, novelist Sam Lipsyte, and cross-genre artists Mendi+Keith Obadike.  The writers will read work written especially for the series, stories told from the “first person plural” or the “we” point-of-view.  They will also read from other recent work. Admission is free.

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS.  She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton), Best African American Essays, 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project.   Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of The Ask, Venus Drive, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book of 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award.  His writing has appeared in Bookforum, N+1, McSweeney’s, Tin House, NOON, The Quarterly, Esquire, GQ and Playboy, among other places.  He is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.

Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art, and literature. Their work has been commissioned  The NY African Film Festival / Electronic Arts Intermix, Northwestern University, Bucknell University, The Kitchen, The Yale Cabaret, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Rhizome / The New Museum, and The Whitney Museum of Art. They have released two albums on Bridge Records, a book of poetry with Lotus Press, and two forthcoming artist books on 1913 Press. They are currently working on a new series of sound installations and touring their opera-masquerade Four Electric Ghosts.  www.blacknetart.com

For more information, contact:    fppharlem [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com

Venue:

Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
March 5, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/