Readings by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
and
Adriana Ramirez
SUNDAY, August 28th, 2011
6:30pm
At the JustSeeds spot: 3410 Penn Ave
Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. The store will be open starting at 2pm-- arrive early to check out the art and merchandise, including a beautiful exhibit by artist Thea Gahr. Come around back to the second floor entrance.
Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela is Pittsburgh's Cyberpunk Apocalypse writer-in-residence for the month of August. She writes stories. During her stay in Pittsburgh, she has been working on completing her first novel which starts in Detroit then moves to a fictional Latin American country. She is a 2005 recipient of a Leeway Transformation Award for her work as a social change writer and DJ. She is a co-founder of Thread Makes Blanket, a small press out of Philadelphia, that published Letter from Tombs Prison, 1917 a publication that features work from Justseeds artists Mary Tremonte and Shaun Slifer. Marissa is currently an assistant professor of Creative Writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. As part of a new educational component of Books Through Bars Philadelphia, she will be instructing a free correspondence course in Latino History and Culture for inmates in solitary confinement in PA. She lives in Philadelphia.
Adriana Ramirez, nonfiction writer and performance poet, has over fifteen years experience in theater, spoken word, and advocacy. Once ranked the 26th slam poet in the world (iwps 2006), she helped found and co-hosted the Latino/Indigenous Showcase at the National Poetry Slam; she now hosts the Steel City Slam in Pittsburgh. Her poems and writings have appeared on the internet, on subway station walls, and occasionally, on pieces of dead wood. She love technology and refreshments—mineral water, limes, and cheap Mexican food. Adriana lives in Pittsburgh, where she is writing a book about her death fantasies, Colombia, and the way we tell stories around violence. She roots for el tricolor in the World Cup. Adriana teaches at The University of Pittsburgh.
Now that the weather actually is cooling off, show your Pittsburgh cohorts what you've been working on this past month. Have you written something? Built something? Drawn a comic? Made a video? Something else? Bring it and $2-4 and present it. Or if you haven't done anything this month but want to see what other people have done, bring that $2-4 and gather 'round. At the end of the evening, all attendees vote on coolest project, and that person wins a trophy and half the door money. We're still saving up for a video projector, and the other half of the money will go towards that.
