EventsCommon Ground#643

Publishing-in-Transit: Autonomedia

Featuring Jim Fleming, Lewanne Jones, Lorraine Schein, and Cole Swensen

Thursday, September 8, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Autonomedia Founding Editor and Publisher Jim Fleming, documentary filmmaker Lewanne Jones, and writer Lorraine Schein join poet and Rail Contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Alyn Mare.

In this Talk

Jim Fleming

Founding Editor and Publisher Jim Fleming has been at Autonomedia since 1983. Autonomedia is an autonomous zone for arts radicals in both old and new media that publishes books on radical media, politics and the arts that seek to transcend party lines, bottom lines and straight lines. Autonomedia also maintains the Interactivist Info Exchange, an online forum for discourse and debate on themes relevant to the books they publish. From 1980-2015, Fleming was an Adjunct Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY.

Lewanne Jones

Based in New York City, Lewanne Jones is an archival producer, audio-visual researcher and project archivist. She has researched for network and public television programs, museum installations and university-sponsored websites. Her research spans subjects ranging from African American history to neuroscience. Recent documentary projects include Jackie Robinson (Florentine Films), She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (Mary Dore) and many others. She is currently consulting on several projects, including an independent documentary about a school of radical American women poets and another about the Native American history of California. She has been nominated several times for News & Documentary Emmy Awards (including 2022) and is the recipient of an Acker Award.

Lorraine Schein

NY-based poet and writer Lorraine Schein is a former member of the Libertarian Book Club. Her work has appeared in The Unbearables, Semiotexte SF, and elsewhere. Her speculative fiction and poetry has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, and NewMyths and in the anthologies Aphrodite Terra, Tragedy Queens and Wild Women. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from mayapplepress.com. Her new book is The Lady Anarchist Café, a collection of poetry and fiction, published by Autonomedia.

Cole Swensen

Photo by Anthony Hayward

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨