[Brooklyn]

Reading and Launch Party: Saretta Morgan's chapbook Feeling Upon Arrival with Chia-Lun Chang, Vi Khi Nao, Meg Onli, and Natalie Diaz
July 24, 2018, 7:00 pm
at Spoonbill Books

Join Ugly Duckling Presse at Spoonbill Studios for a reading and launch party for Saretta Morgan's chapbook Feeling Upon Arrival. Readers include Chia-Lun Chang, Vi Khi Nao, Meg Onli, Natalie Diaz, and Saretta Morgan. Click here to be linked to the facebook event. About the book: Inspired by the potential of space to order experiences of time and desire, the language in Feeling Upon Arrival turns between orienting device and sensual index. Characters emerge and disperse as gestures across a queered and somatic geography in pursuit of the bodies present landscapes deny. About the readers: Meg Onli is the Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent exhibition Speech/Acts explores experimental black poetry and how the social and cultural constructs of language have shaped black American experiences. Prior to joining Institute of Contemporary Art she was the Program Coordinator at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. While at the Graham Foundation she worked on the exhibitions Architecture of Independence: African Modernism and Barbara Kasten: Stages. In 2010 she created the website Black Visual Archive for which she was awarded a 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014 she was the recipient of a research grant from the Graham Foundation for the collaborative project Remaking the Black Metropolis: Contemporary Art, Urbanity, and Blackness in America with curator Jamilee Polson Lacy. Onli holds a Master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her writing has appeared in Art21, Daily Serving, and Art Papers. Chia-Lun Chang is the author of One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press). Recent work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bettering American Poetry Volume 2, PEN America, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, Vinyl and 6x6. She has received fellowships and support from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tofte Lake Center, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Poets House. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City. Vi Khi Nao is the author of a novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press), and two poetry collections: The Old Philosopher (Nightboat Books) and Umbilical Hospital(1913 Press). Vi’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She was the winner of the 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. As a text-based artist, Saretta Morgan's work engages relationships between intimacy and organization. Recent writhing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, The Volta, Nepantla, Apogee and Best American Experimental Writing. She has designed interactive, text-based experiences for The Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Beacon, and Tenri Cultural Institute. Saretta received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. She is a 2016-2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace resident and author of the chapbook, Room for a Counter Interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017)