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Nicole Peyrafitte curates our 137th Wednesday Poetry Reading with Pierre Joris, Marcella Durand, Latasha Diggs, and E.J. McAdams.
In this talk
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna 2013). Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals including the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAM, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, Lincoln Center, and more. She is the recipient of the C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, the Whiting Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, among others. She lives in Harlem.
Marcella Durand
Marcella Durand is the author of several books, most recently To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021), and is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. She is currently working on a new collection, Circles for Wheelmakers, and has led bird-poetry walks in Corlears Hook Park and Naval Cemetery Landscape. She grew up in Lower Manhattan and loves the mysteries, emotion and challenges of urban birding.
Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry & Microliths They are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose. In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil published Arabia (not so) Deserta(Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi literature). Other recent works include A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly , & Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis .
E.J. McAdams
E.J. McAdams is a poet and artist, exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. He has published multiple chapbooks and his first book LAST is forthcoming from BlazeVOX in September 2023. He is currently in a group show Bay Ridge Through An Ecological Lens at Stand4 Gallery where PLAIN/AIR/ECOLOGIES/COLLECTIVE/LINK/BAG his collaboration with Jimbo Blachly is installed. For his day job, he works for the birds, currently at BirdLife International.
Nicole Peyrafitte
Nicole Peyrafitte’s work – in the form of paintings, drawings, films, texts, photography – cultivates “sympoiesis” (making-with). The series Karstic-Actions (2011- ), explores proprioception and kinesthesia as meeting points between (action) painting, poetry, text, voice, photography, film, health, improvised music, and, at times, cooking. Peyrafitte has shared food with audiences since the 90s in a search for sustainability of body & mind, with health as central axis. Recent works include Antediluvian Sympoiesis — Sapar Contemporary Gallery, NYC (2022); Karstic Actions/ Works with Pierre Joris — Gallery Simoncini, Luxembourg (2021); 11 Women of Spirit, Salon Zürcher, NYC (2020). Publications include Connection en Millefeuille (RedfoxPress 2022) and Landsc0pes (2018).
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.