Join us on Sunday, November 18th at Silvana in Harlem for an evening of politics, culture, and history featuring writers Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Judith Baumel, Tanya Domi, Max S. Gordon, Ricardo Hernandez, Ruby Shamir, and Vanessa K.Valdés. This is our third year hosting a post-election reading and if we can judge by the two prior readings, this one will be special. You’ll leave energized. The reading is from 6-8pm. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free. There will be cake!
Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is an author, radio contributor, and environmental policy consultant. He has appeared on FOX News, Al-Jazeera, ABC News, and contributed to “The Takeaway.” As a writer, he’s appeared in The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Daily Beast, GOOD Magazine, ColorLines, Wiretap and Elan Magazine. His is the author of the book “Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet” and contributor to All-American: 45 American Men On Being Muslim. He is a former sustainability policy advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and member of the founding team of the Brooklyn Academy for Science and the Environment. He currently serves as the Director of Community Affairs at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and on the board of the International Living Future Institute. Ibrahim earned a BA in History and Political Science from University of Rhode Island and a master’s in public administration from Baruch College, City University of New York.
Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. A recent Fulbright Fellow in Italy at the University of Genoa, she is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers, Now, and The Kangaroo Girl.
Tanya Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate of the Harriman Institute where she teaches human rights and international relations in the Western Balkans. Prior to joining the faculty in 2008, Domi served in the U.S. Army for 15 years and later worked for the late Congressman Frank McCloskey (D-IN-8), serving as his defense policy analyst in the early 1990s during the run-up to the Bosnian war. Domi was seconded by the U.S. State Department to the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina 1996-2000 and served as Spokesperson, Counselor to the Head of Mission and Chair of the OSCE Media Experts Commission. Domi has worked in a dozen countries, including Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia regarding democratic, economic, media and political transitional development, as well as human rights and gender/sexual identity issues. Domi is a widely published author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Magazine, Al Jazeera America, The Christian Science Monitor, The Balkanist, Balkan Insight, Radio Free Europe and The Institute for War and Peace Reporting. She is a graduate of Central Michigan University where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Political Science in 1982 and earned a Masters of Arts degree at Columbia University in Human Rights in 2007. She is currently writing a book on the LGBTI human rights movement in the Western Balkans.
Max S. Gordon is a writer and performer. He has been published in the anthologies Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews and Latinos (University of Michigan Press, 1991), Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of African-American Lesbian and Gay Fiction (Henry Holt, 1996). His work has also appeared on openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, and other progressive on-line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally. His essays include “Bill Cosby, Himself, Fame, Narcissism and Sexual Violence”, “A Different World: Why We Owe The Cosby Accusers An Apology”, “Resist Trump: A Survival Guide”, and “Family Feud: Jay-Z, Beyoncé and the Desecration of Black Art”
Ricardo Hernandez is the son of Mexican immigrants. A recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and Poets House, his work has appeared most recently in The Offing, Foundry, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s an MFA candidate at Rutgers-Newark.
Ruby Shamir is an award-winning author, a ghostwriter, an adaptor of adult non-fiction for children, and a literary researcher based in New York City. She’s performed research, editorial planning, editing, and writing for many high profile non-fiction best-sellers, including books by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, and Tom Brokaw. Her work as a ghost-writer has been reviewed as “lyrical,” “eloquent,” “winning,” “thoughtful,” “personal and appealing.” To The Moon, her middle grade adaptation of Jeffrey Kluger’s Apollo 8, received a starred review from the School Library Journal. Shamir writes a series of picture books on American history and civics. What’s the Big Deal About Elections came out last August to favorable reviews. What’s the Big Deal About First Ladies, (Philomel, 2017) received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. That book and What’s the Big Deal About Freedom (Philomel, 2017) were chosen for the International Literacy Association Children’s Choice Award list. Her public policy and political experience includes working for three and a half years in the Clinton White House and leading Hillary Rodham Clinton’s New York Senate office as well as policy development work for the AFL-CIO and writing coaching for the marketing department at IBM.
Born and raised here in New York City, Vanessa K. Valdés is an associate professor at The City College of New York. In addition to the languages of Spanish and Portuguese, she teaches on the African diaspora in the Americas, that is, the histories and literatures of Black peoples in Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean, and their communities here in the United States. Her most recent book is Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017): it is the first to situate Mr. Schomburg squarely within his Black Latinx identity.