Reading, discussion and DJ set. Harmony and Hanif share poetry and prose on performance and specifically the topic of rupture and failure, failed or refused performances, accompanied by a DJ set and new music from Kelman Duran that will feature examples both prepared and improvised in real time.
Should performance turn toward the ruins and failure as a final frontier as opposed to upholding the now-redundant and expected tropes of spectacle?
Accessibility
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Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Harmony Holiday (she/her) is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker. and the author of five collections of poetry including Maafa ( 2022), Hollywood Forever (2017), and Negro League Baseball (2011), all with Fence Books, as well as A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom (Birds, LLC, 2019) and Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2014).
Holiday curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220. She’s a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times’ Image magazineand 4Columns. Her work has appeared in TheNew Yorker, Bookforum, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Drift, and other publications. Holiday’s first solo exhibition, Black Backstage, exploring the aspects of black performance culture that cannot be spectacularized through film, and sound sculpture, opened at The Kitchen in New York in 2024.
Holiday has been awarded fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, The Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among other awards for her writing.
Kelman Duran is a Dominican producer, composer and visual artist whose cross-discipline, cross-genre approach has built him relationships and creative roots across New York, Los Angeles, London, South Korea, Milan, South Dakota and beyond.