SPRING 2019:
Experiments in Joy
by Gabrielle Civil
MEMOIR / PERFORMANCE ART / BLACK FEMINISM / #RECURRENT
Gabrielle Civil’s Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.
Civil has made a book into a performance space and living archive. Words dance and bodies speak: together they invent languages of keen pleasure and ardent thought… Read, watch, listen and dream. Be transformed. —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland: A Memoir
Losing Miami
by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
POETRY / BILINGUAL / ENVIRONMENTAL / #RECURRENT
Losing Miami is an experiment in grieving the potential loss of Miami to rising sea levels. What are we losing if we lose Miami, a seemingly impossible city formed out of Caribbean migration and the transformation of language? This book asks how we cope with loss at such a grand scale, all while the world continues to rapidly change.
In Losing Miami, Florida figures as the locus for family, exile, and climate change in this beyond-book, which commemorates and elegizes the id-beauty of the state. Like Eduardo Galeano, Ojeda-Sagué speaks in fictions and dreams and hurricanes in order to capture the myriad currents that shape the geography and history of the state, particularly in the Cuban-American community that he describes with tenderness and acuity in an inspired approach to inscription. —Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Cruel Futures
Letters to My City
by Mike Sonksen
POETRY / ESSAYS / LOS ANGELES / WRIT LARGE
The poems and essays in Letters to My City combine two decades of field experience, research, personal observations, and stories told to the author, a third-generation Los Angeles native, by his grandfather and other family members, to interrogate all sides of Los Angeles, its streets, its people, its neighborhoods, as a means to examine the postmodern metropolis.
Psychopomps
by Alex DiFrancesco
MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / TRANS/LGBTQ / CCM
Psychopomps follows DiFrancesco on the search for family, marriage, relationships with other trans people, attempts to build community, and for the elusive link to ancient beliefs about the special spiritual role of the trans individual in society.
Psychopomps is a collection of essays that examines not just the ways in which we are torn apart, but more importantly, the ways we knit ourselves back together. DiFrancesco has a deft hand with language and a keen insight into herself and others, and this collection captures what it means to be young and bent toward justice in this moment in time.
–Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
(the other house)
by Rocío Carlos
POETRY / BILINGUAL / MEMORY / GHOSTS / #RECURRENT
(the other house) is a book, a poem, a book of poems, that is also ghost document and prenatal correspondence. It was written as the author read through the draft of a manuscript for The Yellow House, by her friend, the poet Chiwan Choi. Ghost because it is a letter of the dead to the dead, but prenatal because the manuscript it addresses hadn’t been published yet. Her notes and questions eventually became a conversation with the text itself, with the speaker of the poems, with no one in particular, with the dead, with old lovers, with her own work, and with the author herself. This book is a response, a map, a thread of hauntings, a reconstructed memory of loss and the body, language and desire.
The Other House is less a blueprint and more of a map, a legend, and a history of a home assembled piece by piece from a language made from mismatched tongues. Carlos refuses convention at every turn. She takes your rigid expectations and returns them as polished stones. With Carlos, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. This book reminds me of everything I love about poetry.
–Joseph Rios, author of Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations
Summer 2019:
Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs
by Laura Hyunjhee Kim
BLOBS / NONFICTION / THEORY / CCM
Fall 2019:
Navigating With(out) Instruments
by Traci Kato-Kiriyama
POETRY / Writ Large
American Symphony: Other White Lies
by Suiyi Tang
EXPERIMENTAL / FICTION / CCM
The Sky Forever
by Kimberly Alidio
POETRY / EXPERIMENTAL / Writ Large
Between Appear and Disappear
by Doug Rice
HYBRID / MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / CCM
Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
by Hillary Leftwich
FICTION / SHORT STORIES / CCM