2016 Literature - 6 projects, representing 8 artists

Jesse Ball Chicago, IL Project Title: The Census Taker Literature: Hybrid

Short description: Drawing on the author’s personal family history, The Census Taker is a travel- narrative following a retired doctor traveling door-to-door with his adult Down Syndrome son.

Long description: The Census Taker is a travel-narrative about a retired doctor who travels north conducting the census with his adult son, a man with Down Syndrome. Melding fiction and non- fiction, the book will consist of a series of sections, each a discrete visit to a house or a rumination that the census taker has regarding his past life. The text will be interwoven with photographs of the author’s brother, who had Down Syndrome and died at the age of 25. Through The Census Taker, Ball will imagine what his brother would have been like had he lived into adulthood, presenting a portrait of what it means to know and love a person with Down Syndrome that runs counter to our culture’s representations of the condition.

Bio: Jesse Ball was born in 1978 in Long Island, NY. In 1983, he wrote to and received a reply from the Queen of England. In the ensuing 20 years, he achieved various degrees from public school, then Vassar College and Columbia University. His book of verse, March Book was published in 2004, and since then he has had many volumes of prose, verse, and drawings published with various presses, including A Cure for Suicide (Pantheon, 2015; short-listed for National Book Award) and Silence Once Begun (Pantheon, 2014). He has also had exhibitions of assorted types in film, draftsmanship and art both nationally and abroad. Since 2007 he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exploring pedagogy focused around the questioning method, lucid dreaming method, walking method, skepticism and absurdity. He has a general obsession with games, including chess, backgammon and baduk.

desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario) Brooklyn, NY Project Title: desveladas: a fotoconversation Literature: Interdisciplinary

Short description: desveladas: a fotoconversation borrows from the narrative elements of the graphic novel to explore the border encounters of three over-documented daughters of the Americas.

Long description: desveladas: visual conversations from the americas was conceived as multimedia conversations among three "over-documented daughters of the Americas": poet Sheila Maldonado, journalist Macarena Hernández, and writer Nelly Rosario. Their cultural roots are in the United States, Honduras, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. The chosen name of the collaborative emerged from the artists' many desvelos (all-nighters) spent discussing abstract and concrete borders encountered throughout their collective writing and teaching experiences. Included in the proposed multimedia project is work on a fotonovela; this collaborative graphic novel in photos also draws from collected video interviews, maps, primary documents, illustrations, and writings. desveladas has presented at Princeton University and for Kweli and Asterix journals in partnership with The New York Times African Heritage Network.

Bios: Multimedia journalist Macarena Hernández, a former editorial columnist at The Dallas Morning News and the Rio Grande Valley Bureau Chief for The San Antonio Express-News, teaches journalism at Baylor University. Prior to becoming the Fred Hartman Distinguished Professor of Journalism, she was the Victoria Advocate Endowed Professor in the Humanities at the University of Houston-Victoria. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and PBS. She is a media consultant for organizations such as Solidaridad Fronteriza, a Dominican Republic- based human rights advocacy organization. She is currently directing the establishment of Inite: Students for Students, an organization that fundraises to pay tuition for students in other countries including Haiti, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Hernández has appeared on shows such as NBC’s Dateline, CNN’s Headline News, and on National Public Radio. She’s covered U.S. Latino issues such as immigration and education.

Sheila Maldonado is the author of one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press, 2011), her debut poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Rattapallax, Callaloo and Me No Habla with Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry. She teaches creative writing at The City University of New York and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She holds degrees in English from Brown University and poetry from The City College of New York. She lives in a one-bedroom in uptown Manhattan where she is working on a new book of poems and an ongoing project about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.

Nelly Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel (Pantheon, 2002), winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear in various anthologies and journals, including Callaloo, Meridians, Review, Chess Life, and el diario/La Prensa. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University and was formerly on faculty in the MFA Program at Texas State University. She was a recent Visiting Scholar at MIT, her alma mater, and presently serves as writer/researcher for the Blacks at MIT History Project. Rosario lives in Brooklyn, where she's at work on a speculative novel on community medicine.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs New York, NY Project Title: Global Studies Literature: Poetry

Short description: Miming the textbook in structure, Global Studies is a collection of poems and flash prose that examines the ambiguity of history.

Long description: Global Studies is a collection of poetry that mimes the history textbook in structure, but at a closer look, is quite the opposite. The texts examine the ambiguity of history while employing multiple languages, mistranslations and vernaculars. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs will collaborate with a graphic artist to create charts, graphs and multiple-choice mini-quizzes that will all

2 play a role in the book’s final manifestation. The text is occasionally written in the persona of an Indian interpreter, engaging Diggs’ personal history (her ninth great grandfather was apparently an Indian interpreter). Concerned with social media, the internet and the fragility of Wikipedia, the project investigates the ways certain historical and current events remain lost to translation, transcription, the archive and a hashtag.

Bio: A writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), a collection of songs, poems and myths. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center. As an independent curator and artistic director, she has staged events at BAM Café, Lincoln Center Out of Doors and El Museo del Barrio and is the co-founder and co-editor of Coon Bidness/SO4 Magazine. A native of Harlem and Cave Canem fellow, LaTasha is the recipient of numerous awards, including New York Foundation for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Laundromat Project, the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S.–Japan Friendship Commission.

Percival Everett South Pasadena, CA Project Title: The Trusted Story Literature: Fiction

Short description: The Trusted Story is an experimental novel that questions the authority of the book, the text, the author and the reader.

Long description: With The Trusted Story, Percival Everett will seek to challenge the authority of the book, of the text, of the author and even of the reader. The work will raise questions about the location of the story—not simply the setting, but rather, just where the substance of the art is to be found. This project follows Everett’s novels, The Water Cure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, which challenge the authority of the narrator and the narratee, and the novel Assumption, which plays with the idea of readers’ expectations. For The Trusted Story, Everett would like to see what kinds of conversation emerge as readers discover where their received and shared stories line up and where they do not.

Bio: Percival Everett has been publishing novels since 1983. The book of stories, Half an Inch of Water (Graywolf Press, 2015), is his 28th book. He has just completed and sold a novel to Graywolf Press that is scheduled for publication in 2017. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and a frequent teacher at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Eileen Myles New York, NY Project Title: My Travels Literature: Nonfiction

Short description: My Travels tells the author’s life story through a series of linked travel essays that recount specific experiences in Boston, New York, India, Russia and Ireland.

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Long description: My Travels tells the author’s life story through is a series of linked essays on specific travels—geographically, chronologically, morally and politically—though the focus and experience of each is radically different. In the research phase of the book, Myles will live for several months in her native Boston, which she left in 1974, to see what’s left of her accent and who is currently writing poetry in the city. An essay about New York concerns living on the streets for short periods of times with a Buddhist group. Other essays focus on: living in Ireland in 2007; travelling to India in 1990, after which she became a write-in candidate for president; and Myles’ journeys to Russia and Eastern Europe in 1995, which coincided with her experience of menopause.

Bio: Eileen Myles came to New York in 1974 from Boston to be a poet. She went to Catholic schools in Arlington, MA and graduated in 1971 from UMass Boston. She is the author of 19 books, most recently Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) and Snowflake/different streets as well as I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2015), plus a reissue of Chelsea Girls, a queer classic. Her poetic education took place at St. Mark’s Poetry Project where she studied in workshops and was the Artistic Director from 1984–86. She writes art and book reviews for Rookie, The Nation, Art in America and Bookforum. Her essays appeared in 2015 in both the Whitney Biennial and the Liverpool Biennial. In 1992 she conducted a write-in campaign for President of the United States. She has received grants from the Warhol | Creative Capital Arts Writers Program, the Guggenheim Foundation and The Foundation for Contemporary Art. Myles is the recipient of the Clark Award for excellence in art writing.

Dao Strom Portland, OR Project Title: Postwar Tablefruit Literature: Hybrid

Short description: Postwar Tablefruit is a hybrid memoir that juxtaposes prose and visual elements to articulate silences, survival, shadows and the obscuring of history.

Long description: Postwar Tablefruit is a book that draws from Dao Strom’s experience as a woman of color and child of a “postwar” era. Strom’s perspective is anchored in growing up Vietnamese in America in the 1980s, a time of “postwar” silence and forgetting. Juxtaposing prose, lyric fragments, and visual elements, Postwar Tablefruit seeks to expose silences, shadows, the obscuring of history, and to remember—or discern—the nature of what was buried. One essay, “Iowa,” looks at being a person of color in a prestigious writing program. Another essay, “Tablefruit Diatribes,” uses fragments to reflect on power dynamics, especially regarding ideas of the Asian feminine. In addition to the book, there will be a music component to the project.

Bio: Dao Strom is a writer and musician based in Portland, OR. Her work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of two fiction books, Grass Roof, Tin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, praised by The New Yorker as being “quietly beautiful […] hip without being ironic.” Her latest project is an experimental memoir, We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People, accompanied by a music album, East/West, in which, according to the LA Review of Books, “Strom embraces the fragment as the smallest reliable unit of truth.” Strom has received support from the

4 Regional Arts Culture & Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship and the Nelson Algren Award. She was born in Viet Nam and grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California.

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