2015, Events, Festival, Music, Performance, Plenatorium, Storytelling, Visual Art

Invisible Loisaida – Ideas City

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IDEAS CITY

Part of the Street Program 12:00 -6:00pm

Loisaida Inc: Invisible Loisaida

The booth by Loisaida, Inc. will play with the visible and invisible tensions of rescued social spaces, their cultural output, and their lack of inclusion in the mainstream story line of the Lower East Side. Through a collaborative installation by resident artists Edgardo Tomás Larregui and Alejandro Epifanio, the booth will recreate the vernacular architecture of “seclusion” and social gathering elements of the traditional casita or urban community garden. Our casita also involves a strategy to render visible the reality of Loisaida, Inc., a social-cultural-artistic community (Latino/Puerto Rican Lower East Side), whose contributions to New York City and the downtown scene have usually remained unacknowledged, absent, and invisible to the hegemonic artistic and cultural narratives of New York City’s creative myth. The presentation will feature a listening station of oral histories by Laura Zelasnic, performances by ongoing Loisaida Center collaborators and projects: the Salvage Project; Flux Theater Ensemble; the Plenatorium, which nurtures and documents the “plena universe”; and Edwin Torres, a Nuyorican poet, performer, and downtown icon, who will explore the nonappearance of “No-isaida.”

A– ONGOING programming throughout the day:

1. Display and live screen-printing of the templates and prints developed and produced through our workshop: Building Community Through the Arts, a partnership with Hester Street Collaborative.

2. Listening Station featuring oral histories focused on local Latino cultural and community organizations such as CHARAS and Loisaida, Inc., by Laura Zelasnic.

3. Visual Collaborative Installation(s) between artist collaborators of the Loisaida Center. The entire booth will act as an installation and visual collaboration between visual artist’s Alejandro Epifanio and Edgardo Larregui with the support of Urban Garden Center NYC.

B– SCHEDULED programming by time-slots:

3:00 pm – The Salvage Project: 

Story circles facilitated by the Loisaida Center’s artistic residents Flux Theater Ensemble where community members will share the stories of a precious object and have their stories transformed by professional playwrights into short monologues.

http://www.fluxtheatre.org/2015/02/flux-announces-art-residency-loisaida-center/

4:00 pm – Edwin Torres:

“Nuyorican” (New York-Puerto Rican) poet-performer-sound artist and downtown icon will present work based on the Invisible Loisaida theme. Torres’s work bridges numerous downtown and Loisaida traditions and scenes, from the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and beyond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Torres_(poet)

5:00pm – PLENATORIUM:

A project initiative of the Loisaida Center focused on the nurturing and documentation of the practice of Puerto Rican plena, a genre of popular traditional music, song and dance native to the island of Puerto Rico, but related to similar Afro-diasporic expressions throughout the Caribbean and commonly present within the casita/community garden culture.

Planetarium means a space for the plena-universe of activities such as forums, workshops, performances, and other forms of plena-focused sociocultural participation.

http://loisaida.org/plenatorium/

Invisible Loisaida was made possible by: 9C Community Garden – Northeast Avenue C & 9 Street

 

NuyoCuba: Poetics & Diaspora

Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 6:00pm – 8:00pm.
2 hrs ·

(a panel plus performance)

featuring Alberto Abreu Arcia, Aja Monet, and Rich Villar, moderated by Urayoán Noel.

Born in 1961 in Cardenas, Matanzas province, a heartland of African culture in Cuba, Alberto Abreu is a novelist, essayist, and social critic on such topics as race and identity and LGBT issues. He is a member of ARAAC, the Cuban civil rights organization. He was coordinator of Virgilio Piñera Narrative Workshop, held in the city of Matanzas. In 1988, he published a volume of short stories The big world. His essay Virgilio Piñera: a man, an island received in 2000 the Enrique José Varona UNEAC Prize. His La Gaceta de Cuba (2003) received mention in the X Prize . He organized the selection and preparation of Zero hour, an anthology of Matanzas stories which was released in 2005. That same year his book The Writing Games received the Dador Award from the Cuban Book Institute . He also received the Casa de las Américas Prize in 2007. (from http://www.afrocubaweb.com/abreu.htm)
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Aja-Monet is a Cuban-Jamaican poet originally from East NY, Brooklyn. At 19 years old, she was the youngest to ever win the Grand Slam Champion title of the Lower East side’s legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café in 2007. Her work is classically surrealist, engaging altogether Hip Hop, Soul, and literary audiences.

She dedicates her time and energy working with inner-city adolescence, providing performance poetry workshops and opportunities. Aja Monet received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Aja Monet’s first book of poems, The Black Unicorn Sings, was independently published with Penmanship books (2010). She recently collaborated with poet/musician Saul Williams to edit a book of poetry due out on MTV Books/Simon & Schuster Publishing in Fall 2012 called, Chorus. She is currently working on a book of science-fiction and new music. (from https://www.facebook.com/poetajamonet/info?tab=page_info)
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Rich Villar is a writer, performer, editor, activist, and educator originally from Paterson, New Jersey. His first collection of poems, Comprehending Forever, won the Editor’s Choice from the Willow Books Literature Awards in 2013, and it was published by Willow the following year. He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for both his prose and his poetry, and his work has been published in several journals, including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Rattapallax, and Black Renaissance Noire.

He served as a founding director, host, and co-curator for Acentos, a grassroots project fostering the Latino/a voice in American letters. From 2003-2012, through its workshops, panels, reading series, and public programming, Acentos allowed Latino/a poets at all skill levels to connect with multicultural audiences as well as their peers, in the one of the most historic Latino enclaves in the nation, the South Bronx. He has been quoted on Latino/a literature and culture by HBO, The New York Times, and the Daily News. On the radio, he has been heard on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York, and on the long-running NPR newsmagazine “Latino USA.”

Since 2008, he has served as a curator for La Casita at Lincoln Center Out Of Doors, appearing twice as the show’s emcee. He has been a frequent performer, host, and curator at the iconic Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, and he has contributed poems and performances to various theater spaces, including Actors Stock NYC, and Luna Stage in West Orange, NJ. (from https://literatiboricua.wordpress.com/about/)

2014, Bilingual, Caribbean, Central America, Education, Latin America, Performance, Poetry, Politics

Ferguson/Ayotzinapa: CantoMundo Poets Read and Respond

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The Loisaida Center

Monday, December 15, 6-8pm

Ferguson/Ayotzinapa: CantoMundo Poets Read and Respond

featuring: Yesenia Montilla, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Urayoán Noel

This event brings together New York-based current and former fellows of the national Latina/o poets workshop CantoMundo (cantomundo.org/) to read from their work in solidarity with ongoing protests and mobilizations in and around Ferguson, Missouri, and the College of Ayotzinapa in Iguala, Mexico.Many of the poets reading are also participating in #CantoMundoLongestNight, a social-media offering of poems in honor of the countless black and brown bodies slain by state-sanctioned violence.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is from Panama City and the former Canal Zone of Panamá. His poetry has been published in Poetry Magazine, The Best American Experimental Writing, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, The Potomac, MEADE, Lambda Literary, Assaracus, Weave Magazine, The Feminist Wire, The Paris American, Kweli, featured on The Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere in print and online. He is the co-author of PRIME: Poetry & Conversations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). He is a proud CantoMundo and Cave Canem fellow. darrelholnes.com

Yesenia Montilla is a New York City poet with Afro-Caribbean roots & CantoMundo Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals: 5 AM, Adanna, Wideshore and others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Her first collection of poetry The Pink Box is forthcoming from Willow Books in Fall 2015.

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a CantoMundo Fellow and the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). Her work is forthcoming or appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. Rosebud is an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (vidaweb.org). Find out more at 7TrainLove.org

CantoMundo fellow Urayoán Noel is the author of the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa, 2014) and several books of poetry in English and Spanish, including EnUncIAdOr (Editora Emergente, 2014) and the forthcoming Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona). Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he lives in the Bronx and teaches at NYU.

 

*The views and opinions expressed on this event are soley those of the participating poets, scholars and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Loisaida Inc., Acacia Network and staff, and/or any/all contributors to this event.

 

2014, Books, Events, Poetry

InVisible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

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InVisible Movement:

Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

 

 ¡Gracias to all who joined us for the book release!

September 17th, 2014 @ 7 PM

Poet and scholar Urayoán “Ura” Noel, an Assistant Professor of English and Spanish at NYU, presented his new book InVisible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), the first book-length critical study of Nuyorican poetry.

Discounted copies of the book are still available for sale.
 
 

unoel_bookcover

“A crucial contribution to our literary history, In Visible Movement charts the evolution of an increasingly visible movement in the literary arts, shedding light on many related poetries of the past six decades in the process. Noel proposes ‘an understanding of poetry performance as revisionism: operating across and along page and stage,’ an understanding that proceeds from the poets themselves.”

—Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation
 

About the author:

Urayoán Noel is a poet, performer, scholar, and translator who is currently an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Albany and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at NYU. His books include the poetry collections Kool Logic/La lógica kool (Bilingual Press, 2005), Boringkén (Ediciones Callejón/La Tertulia, Puerto Rico, 2008), Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX, 2010), and Los días porosos (Catafixia Editorial, Guatemala, 2012), and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam(University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). His other works include the performance DVD Kool Logic Sessions(Bilingual Press, 2005, with Monxo López), the multimedia project The Edgemere Letters (2011, with Martha Clippinger), and, as translator, the chapbooks ILUSOS by Edwin Torres (Atarraya Cartonera, Puerto Rico, 2010) and Belleza y Felicidad (Belladonna, 2005). He has been a fellow of CantoMundo, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Ford Foundation, and his creative and critical writings have appeared in Latino Studies, Contemporary Literature, Small Axe, Bomb, Fence, and in numerous national and international anthologies. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel earned his B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, his M.A. from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from NYU. He lives in the Bronx.