PRESS RELEASE
&NOW 2015 AT CALARTS
A Festival of New Writing
March 25-28, 2015
&Now is a biennial literary festival known for bringing new and unique forms of writing
to a global audience. It stands as a leading voice for innovative writing by generating an
intense and lively space for panels, readings and performances that unite writers from
different discourses, genres, geographies and traditions. Each &Now festival promises a
vital and dynamic re-thinking of writing as we know and understand it today. The &Now
Festival has been hosted by a succession of universities, including the University of Notre
Dame (2004), Lake Forest College (2006), Chapman University (2007), the University at
Buffalo (2009), UC San Diego (2011), Université de la Sorbonne, Paris (2012), and most
recently, the University of Colorado at Boulder (2013).
Hosted by the MFA Creative Writing Program in the School of Critical Studies,
California Institute of the Arts, on our Valencia campus, &NOW 2015 takes as its theme
BLAST RADIUS: WRITING AND THE OTHER ARTS. In keeping with the spirit
and educational mission of CalArts, it celebrates writing that explodes the boundaries of
visual art, music, filmmaking, and performance to create entirely new artistic forms.
We are proud to announce the abundant talent and diversity of our panels, events and
performances, including our keynote speaker M.NourbeSe Philip, a writer renowned for
her commitment to experimental form and social justice and author of Zong!
The three-and-a-half day festival features over 65 performances, readings, panels and
installations. &Now Blast Radius will also feature a book fair devoted to innovative
publishing; group readings from selected national small presses, and an eclectic offering
of ‘sited’ events around the CalArts campus.
We celebrate &Now Blast Radius’s opening Wednesday with the “Rules of the Cosmos”
at 8 pm, an interactive reading organized by the Red Rover series. The reading is
preceded by a reception from 6-8 to welcome our participants and audience.
Blast Radius Featured Events:
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Thursday morning’s “(Re)Figuring Voice: A Talk, a Screening, a Performance
and Two Readings.” Featuring National Book Award nominee Claudia Rankine,
Christina Miletti, Miranda Mellis, Christine Hume and Laura Elrick, “Refiguring
Voice” explores various dimensions of “voice” in writing: “disembodied,
ventriloquized, multiple, natural, denatured, captive, reproduced, silenced,
uncontrollable, queer, nonsynchronous, post-wounded, vulnearable, racialized,
post-racialized, exploitative and authoritative.”
Thursday night’s “Mongrel Poetiks,” an investigation of hybridity, bodily and
poetic, with Laura Glenum, Eunsong Kim, Lucas de Lima, Jennifer Tamayo and
Ronaldo Wilson
Friday night’s “Collaboration for the Duration,” a panel and performance
exploring the dynamics of collaboration, featuring 3 sets of long-time literary and
artistic collaborators: Carla Harryman, Rachel Levitsky, Judd Morrissey, Jon
Raskin and Jennifer Scappettone
Saturday night’s keynote address by M. NourbeSe Philip.
Daytime Schedule Highlights
The festival theme, BLAST RADIUS: Writing and the Other Arts, is an expansive one,
but certain sub-themes emerge in the 16-page schedule:
Writing and the Visual Arts
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Sound/Image/Text, featuring performances of visual poetry by Christine
Wertheim, Douglas Kearney and Martin Gubbins (Thursday, 11:30-1)
Fictions of Art/Arts of Fiction, a reading and panel exploring fiction’s relation
to the visual arts, featuring National Book Award winner Sarah Shun-Lien
Bynum, Benjamin Weissman, Janet Sarbanes, David Kress and Dimitri
Anastosopoulos (Thursday 2:30-3:45)
Lyrical Visions: Use of the Image in Contemporary Poetics, featuring Diana
Arterian, Amaranth Borsuk, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Robin Coste Lewis and John
Pluecker (Thursday 4-5:15)
Transfers, a panel on the tendencies of conceptual and post-conceptual writing to
transfer the language of the arts to the language of the page, featuring Vincent
Broqua, Olivier Brossard, Frances Richard, Martin Glaz Serup (Friday 10-11:15)
Performing Typo-Graphic Literature, featuring Warren Lehrer, Danny
Cannizzaro, Johanna Drucker, Samantha Gorman (Friday, 2:30-3:45 pm)
Contemporary Book Arts: Analog Technologies and Alternative Economies,
featuring Anne M. Royston, Michael Cross, Chris Dunsmore, April Sheridan
(Friday, 11:30-1)
Power, Slippage and the Visual: The Spaces of Fiction in a Visual Culture, a
reading and panel considering fiction’s relationship to visual culture (social
media, narrative television, cinema and internet browsing), featuring Gregory
Howard, Amina Cain, Adam Novy and Deb Olin Unfurth (Saturday 10-11:15).
Writing and Lens-based Media
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Language in Video Art Now, a screening of video art that features political
speech, literary work, or invented narrative, featuring Maggie Nelson, Danielle
Dean, Harry Dodge, Mariah Garnett, Dylan Mira, Tyler Oyer (Thursday 4-5:15)
With What Tongue, a performance and video screening featuring the work of
Carmina Escobar and Eve Luckring (Friday 2:30-3:45)
(Dis)Embodiment: Digital Performance Remix, a series of performances,
readings and screenings that make use of bodies both as the form and the content,
featuring Ali Rachel Pearl, Amber Bernak, Raphael Dagold, Matt Kirkpatrick
(Friday 2:30-3:45)
Writing and Performance
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Into the Fray, featuring text adapted from Thomas Fick’s novel The Iron Boys
and Vicki Ray’s signature prepared-piano soundscapes. (1:30-2:30 pm)
Rose Secoming, an image-music-text performance responding to the experience
of female aging, and featuring the legendary Pauline Oliveros, Celia Bland, Shira
Dentz, Kathy High (Friday 2:30-3:45)
Writing as a Digital Practice:
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Data-Driven Literary Practices, a panel on generating new literatures via
representing, interpreting and contextualizing “Big Data,” featuring VJ Um Arnel,
Jeremy Hight, Erik Loyer, and Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz (Thursday 4-5:15)
Feminist Poetics and the Internet, a performative presentation and roundtable
conversation with simultaneous anti-surveillance hair & makeup party demo,
featuring Kate Durbin, Becca Klaver, Monica McClure, Stephanie Strickland,
Jennifer Tamayo, Stephanie Young (Thursday 11:30-1)
Narrative Fragments: Art, Language, Algorithm, a panel on language on the
Internet, how it is created, by whom, where it exists, and how it is used, featuring
Mimi Cabell, Orit Gat, Jason Huff, Nicholas O’Brien, Clement Valla (Friday 45:15)
Hybrid Storytelling: Making New Narratives Using the Tools of Design,
presentation focusing on a new approach to narrative and narrative design which
usese graphic elements and design strategies to arrive at hybrid image/texts, with
Zach Dodson and Saku Heinanen (Thrusday, 11:30-1)
Border crossings:
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Transconceptualisms/Transconceptualismos: Emergent Poetics in Spanish,
four Spanish-speaking experimental writers shed light on the context of global
conceptualisms – featuring Marco Antonio Huerta, Roman Lujan, Hugo Garcia
Manriquez, Sara Uribe (Friday 11:30-1)
How to Traffic in Books (And Trace that Traffic), small press editorial
practices in both Californias, featuring Jen Hofer, John Pluecker, Rene Castillo,
Jessica Ceballos, Chiwan Choi, Peter Woods (Thursday, 11:30- 1)
Border Tracing/Imaginary Geographies, with Samiya Bashir, Hilary Mushkin,
Pepe Rojo, Stephanie Sauer (Saturday 2:30-3:45)
And Those That Don’t Survive?, a panel on diasporic poetics, featuring ChingIn Chen, Carina Gia Farrero, Soham Pate (Thursday 11:30-1)
Deep Sitings and Rescue Missons, a panel celebrating the African diasporic
ArkHive, with Tisa Bryant, Tonya Foster, Melanie Sherazi (Saturday 10-11:15)
Volatile Translations, a panel taking up the question, what does a translation do?
How does it move across boundaries and bodies? With Johannes Goransson,
Christian Hawkey, Jen Hofer, Lucas de LIma
Boundary-crossing, literary, psychic, and paranormal:
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Bad Boundaries, panel and reading exploring “bad boundaries” and the potential
for collaboration and connection therein, with Dodie Bellamy, Stephen van Dyck,
Sam Cohen, Megan Milks, Matias Viegener (Thursday 2:30-3:45)
Postrealism and its Discontents: Acker/Burroughs, panel exploring the
possibilities the writing of Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs suggests for
“cut culture,” materiality and embodiment in the digital age, with Davis
Schneiderman, Dodie Bellamy, Joshua Corey, Janet Sarbanes (Friday 4-5:15)
Divination as Praxis, a roundtable discussion on the use of divinatory practices
in writing and writing experiments, with Emerson Whitney, Gina Abelkop, CA
Congrad, Bhanu Kapil, Selah Saterstrom, Mady Schutxman (Friday 4-5:15)
Occult Geographies, a performative reading that asks how the occult contests the
narratives lived as and through our bodies, with Harold Abramowitz, Amanda
Ackerman, Teresa Carmody, Andrea Quaid (Friday 2:30-3:45)
Marvelous Trash: Fan Fiction and Conceptualism, a panel staging an
encounter between fan fiction and conceptual writing, with Johannes Goransson,
Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, Joyelle Mc Sweeney, Megan Milks, Vanessa
Roveta (Saturday 4-5:15)
Writing Space
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Resonances & Repetitions: Poetic Reverie and Space, a panel exploring the
relationship between flesh, sense and landscape in the writing practice, with
Gaston Bachelard’s canonical texts as a departure point, featuring Janice Lee,
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Amanda Ackerman, Seuyuen Uliet Lee, Shoshana Seidman, Laura Vena (Friday
11:30-1)
Apocalypse Now, Or Nearly: Folding Future & Present Together, In
Imagining the Climate Crisis, a roundtable reading and discussion of “Cli-fi,”
fiction addressing the current climate crisis, with John Domini, Matt Bell,
Christina Milletti (Friday 4-5:15)
&Now+Then Infrastructure, image/text presentations on the physical and
imaginary infrastructure of Los Angeles, with Ken Ehrlich, Marina Peterson,
Louis-Georges Schwartz, Sara Kanouse
The ten “sited events” that will occur during the lunch and dinner breaks, include
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Writing on It All: A Neo- Formal Happening, a collaborative
session that projects bureaucratic forms onto the walls and invites
participants to fill them out – wrong. With Alexandra Chasin and Olga
Rogriguez-Ulloa
Un Texto Sobre Arte Contemporaneo? A Text About
Contemporary Art. In 3 three-hour writing sessions, Guido Ignatti
will write a text on contemporary art, in a room, alone, using only a
typewriter. This writing scene will be streamed, via webcam, to
&NOW participants. When the document is done, Ignatti will glue the
pages together and present it as a framed wall text so that only the first
page is visible.
Between Language and Body: Incubating a New Work, featuring
Laura Ann Samuelson and Bhanu Kail incubating works of dance and
text simultaneously, engaging participants
The Which Witch Writer-in-Residence Program at the Saugus
Café. Jen Hutton, Emma Kemp and Adriana Widdoes situate their
roster of writers at the Saugus Café, to produce a text via a rolling
residency period over the course of the festival.
Full registration for all three and a half days of the conference may be purchased for
$100. A day rate of $35 is also available
To see the complete schedule or register, and for other details about the festival,
including receptions and special events, food, directions and accommodations, visit
andnow2015.com.For press inquiries, contact Janet Sarbanes, sarbanes@calarts.edu (213925-8946).