News

2016-09-15: Lambra Literary publishes Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and features Akilah Oliver

2016-09-14: PoemTalk episode #104: A discussion of Akilah Oliver’s “is you is or is you ain’t”

Discussion hosted by Al Filreis with Yolanda Wisher, Patricia Spears Jones, and Charles Bernstein

2016-09-01: Caroline Crumpacker's Astrobolism is available for pre-order!

$15

2016-07-11: Publisher's Weekly reviews Cancer Angel by Beth Murray

The poems possess a welcoming, conversational tone that allows them to flow as one nearly continuous voice. Murray's thoughtful and aware reflections echo points Audre Lorde made in The Cancer Journals and further the conversation about terminal illness.

2016-07-11: Eileen Tabios for Galatea Resurrects reviews Belladonna Chaplet #190 by Natalie Diaz

"It’s amazing—and impressive—the ravishment effected by this chap-length poem: Natalia Diaz’s The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones—: These Hands If Not Gods..."

2016-07-07: Caroline Liu at HelloFlo features Belladonna* and its importance in contemporary independent publishing

"Belladonna* Collaborative Is Redefining a Male-Dominated Literary Environment"

2016-07-07: Cancer Angel by Beth Murray is a SPD Poetry Best-seller for June 2016

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Upcoming Events

Wednesday, October 19 2016

Belladonna* With Series: Valdez, Goldberg, Chan

7-9pm

Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy painterpoet. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin studied at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. They have been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their work has been published in Art21 Magazine, ArtSlant, BRIC Blog, The Cortland Review, In the Flesh Magazine, Poetry Project's The Recluse, and Uncompromising Tang.

Ariel Goldberg's The Photographer was published by Roof Books in 2015. Their book length essay The Estrangement Principle is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in Fall 2016. They are the Friday Night Coordinator at The Poetry Project.

Wo Chan is a multidisciplinary performance artist & poet. They have received honors from Poets House, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Asian American Writers Workshop, and has been published in VYM Magazine, The Margins, No Tokens, and elsewhere. Wo is a standing member of the Brooklyn based performance collective Switch N' Play, and has performed at venues including Dixon Place, Brooklyn Pride & the Architectural Digest Expo.

Belladonna* Collaborative's programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 
Location: Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA
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Saturday, October 22 2016

Belladonna* Party!

5-9pm, email for details

 
Location: at Jill's house in Bed-Stuy
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Saturday, October 29 2016

Book Launch party for Caroline Crumpacker's ASTROBOLISM, with Jason Zuzga

7-9pm

We are excited to host the launch of Caroline Crumpacker's ASTROBOLISM (Belladonna*, 2016) and Jason Zuzga's HEAT WAKE (Saturnalia Press, 2016)

CAROLINE CRUMPACKER lives with daughter Coco and her partner Roberto Rossi in Red Hook, New York. A bit further upstate, she runs The Millay Colony for the Arts, an artists' residency program and arts center. Caroline was a founding Poetry Editor of Fence magazine, an editor of the French/American online magazine DoubleChange, and a contributing editor for circumference magazine. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, and author of the chapbooks Recherche Theories (Etherdome Press, 2010), The Institution in Her Twilight (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011), and Upon Nostalgia (Belladonna*, 2011). Her poetry, translations, essays, and reviews have also appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman, 2008), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007), and Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse Press, 2004).

ASTROBOLISM is pulled, marionette-like, by tethers to feminist anxieties and curiosities, motherhood, partnerhood, delight (if also dismay) in an evolving sense of urbanism, and, through all of the above, a reckoning with end-times existence that attempts to be as sympathetic as it is mournful as it is outraged.

After a series of jobs in New York publishing and a residential poetry fellowship year at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown MA, JASON ZUZGA completed an M.F.A. in poetry and nonfiction at the University of Arizona, followed by a year as the poet-in-residence in the James Merrill House. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. from the English Department for his dissertation “Uncanny World: Envisioning Nature in Documentary” in August 2016. His debut book of poetry, Heat Wake was published by Saturnalia Books in March 2016. His poetry and nonfiction has been published in numerous journals, such as Tin House, The Awl, the Yale Review, and the Paris Review. He is the Other/Nonfiction co-editor of FENCE.

Zuzga’s latest work, HEAT WAKE, mixes science with humor, humanity, whimsy and love. In his work the reader encounter natures in myriad forms, all crafted from the unusual perspective of a poet astonished by the world and at work among the queerness of life, the odd sweetness of other people, the city, nature, love, and humanity. The poems unfold amid the presence of stubborn rocks, the vast ocean and its shores, the intimate details of a suburban New Jersey landscape. The book’s exuberant poems take a journey through time itself: the limited time of humans versus time evolutionary and geological. The poems present in rollicking, playful language and joyful imagery, glancing at the infinite and at the future imagined from the desert in Arizona to Mars.

Belladonna* Collaborative's publications are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

 
Location: Torn Page / Page Poetry Parlor 435 W 22nd St, New York, New York 1001
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Tuesday, November 22 2016

Belladonna* With Series: Keelay Gipson, Theodore (Ted) Kerr, and T'ai Freedom Ford at BAM

co-presented with Lambda Literary and Wendy's Subway

BAM Fisher, Sharp Lower Lobby 321 Ashland Place Brooklyn, NY Wendy’s Subway Reading Room 7-9pm

Keelay Gipson is a multi-disciplinary artist including work as an actor, filmmaker, director and award-winning playwright. His play The Lost won 4 awards as part of the 2014 Planet Connections Theater Festivity and went on to a sold-out run at SCENE in the Summer of 2015. He was chosen as one of six playwrights featured as part of Harlem9’s Obie Award Winning 48 Hours in Harlem at The National Black Theatre.

Canadian born Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer and organizer whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS and community. He was the programs manager at Visual AIDS. He received his MA from Union Theological Seminary where he researched Christian Ethics and HIV. He is a founding member of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective. His writing has appeared in POZ, The Advocate, WSQ, Lambda Literary, Drain, IndieWire, and Cineaste.

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Ivy, The Brooklyn Review, Bronx Biannual and Kweli. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, No, Dear, The African American Review, Vinyl, Muzzle, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2012 and 2013, she completed two multi-city tours as a part of a queer women of color literary salon, The Revival. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shocklee. She is a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and the Poetry Project’s 2016 Emerge-Surface-Be Poetry fellow. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is forthcoming Spring 2017 from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at:shesaidword.com

Belladonna* Collaborative's programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 
Location: BAM Fisher, Sharp Lower Lobby 321 Ashland Place Brooklyn, NY
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Friday, December 09 2016

Belladonna* With Series: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Torkwase Dyson at The Poetry Project

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Torkwase Dyson
8 pm – 10pm
The Poetry Project
131 E 10th St,
New York, NY 10003, United States

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of "Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America". The first volume of a planned trilogy on African-Americans and utopia (Harlem, Haiti and the Black Belt of the American south), it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and cited by BOOKFORUM as the "Best New York Book" written in the twenty years since the magazine's founding. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Chimurenga, Bidoun, A Public Space, Creative Time Reports, Harper's, Essence and Vogue, among many others. She has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, the Whiting Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. Her 2015 book for young readers "Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence a Young Artist in Harlem" (commissioned by MoMA and illustrated by Christopher Myers) was named by Booklist among the year's top books about art for children. Rhodes-Pitts organizes projects through The Freedwomen's Bureau, gathering collaborators across the fields of visual art, music, theater, film, and education to produce events at venues like Harlem Stage, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Museum, PS 1 / MoMA and public spaces in Harlem.

Torkwase Dyson received her MFA from Yale University in painting/printmaking. An interdisciplinary artist, her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Fund, Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practices, The Green Festival of New York, Obsidian Arts and Public funds of the City of Minneapolis, Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia, and Dorchester Projects in Chicago. Torkwase is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Belladonna* Collaborative's programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 
Location: The Poetry Project 131 E 10th St, New York, NY 10003, United States
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Wednesday, February 08 2017

AWP Conference
 
Location: Washington, DC, United States
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Donations

Belladonna* is a 501c3 non-profit organization, and all donations to us are fully tax-deductible. We are grateful to the generous contributions from our supporters. Any amount helps! You can make a one-time donation here, or scroll down for membership and subscription options.

Memberships

Join us in providing a path to new audiences for experimental women writers from a spectrum of historically underrepresented communities, whose work resists conventional publication models. Belladonna* is an independent, unaffiliated, and volunteer-powered collaborative literary series and small press publisher. With your support, we can maintain our operating expenses in order to focus our energies on event and publication projects!

All levels of support will be acknowledged on our website, unless you prefer to remain anonymous.

Advocate Membership: $5/month
Thanks plus our most recent chaplet!

Friend Membership: $10/month
Thanks plus Betsy Fagin's broadside "decolonized" and our most recent chaplet!

Sustainer Membership: $20/month
Thanks plus one full-length book of your choice, Betsy Fagin's broadside "decolonized" and our most recent chaplet!

Subscriptions

Receive all publications and ephemera produced in the current calendar year!

Supporting Subscription: $100

Donor Subscription: $150

Benefactor Subscription: $200