PRESS RELEASE

&NOW 2015 AT CALARTS

A Festival of New Writing

March 25-28, 2015

&Now is a biennial literary festival known for bringing new and unique forms ofwriting to a global audience. It stands as a leading voice for innovative writing by generating an intense and lively space forpanels, readings and performancesthat unite writers from different discourses, genres, geographies and traditions. Each&Now festival promises a vital and dynamic re-thinking of writing as we know and understand it today. The &Now Festival has been hosted by a succession of universities, including the University of Notre Dame (2004), Lake Forest College (2006), Chapman University (2007), the University at Buffalo (2009), UC San Diego (2011), Université de la Sorbonne, Paris (2012), and most recently, the University of Colorado at Boulder (2013).

Hosted by the MFA Creative Writing Program in the School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, on our Valencia campus, &NOW 2015 takes as its theme BLAST RADIUS: WRITING AND THE OTHER ARTS. In keeping with the spirit and educational mission of CalArts, it celebrates writing that explodes the boundaries of visual art, music, filmmaking, and performance to create entirely new artistic forms.

We are proud to announce the abundant talent and diversity of our panels, events and performances, including our keynote speaker M.NourbeSe Philip, a writer renowned for her commitment to experimental form and social justice and author of Zong!

The three-and-a-half day festival features over 65 performances, readings, panels and installations.&Now Blast Radius will also feature a bookfair devoted to innovative publishing; group readings from selected national small presses, and an eclectic offering of ‘sited’ events around the CalArts campus.

We celebrate &Now Blast Radius’s opening Wednesday with the “Rules of the Cosmos” at 8 pm, an interactive reading organized by the Red Rover series. The reading is preceded by a reception from 6-8 to welcome our participants and audience.

Blast Radius Featured Events:

  • Thursday morning’s “(Re)Figuring Voice: A Talk, a Screening, a Performance and Two Readings.” Featuring National Book Award nominee Claudia Rankine, Christina Miletti, Miranda Mellis, Christine Hume and Laura Elrick, “Refiguring Voice” explores various dimensions of “voice” in writing: “disembodied, ventriloquized, multiple, natural, denatured, captive, reproduced, silenced, uncontrollable, queer, nonsynchronous, post-wounded, vulnearable, racialized, post-racialized, exploitative and authoritative.”
  • Thursday night’s “Mongrel Poetiks,” an investigation of hybridity, bodily and poetic, with Laura Glenum, Eunsong Kim, Lucas de Lima, Jennifer Tamayo and Ronaldo Wilson
  • Friday night’s “Collaboration for the Duration,” a panel and performance exploring the dynamics of collaboration, featuring 3 sets of long-time literary and artistic collaborators: Carla Harryman, Rachel Levitsky, Judd Morrissey, Jon Raskin and Jennifer Scappettone
  • Saturday night’s keynote address by M. NourbeSe Philip.

Daytime Schedule Highlights

The festival theme, BLAST RADIUS: Writing and the Other Arts, is an expansive one, but certain sub-themes emerge in the 16-page schedule:

Writing and the Visual Arts

  • Sound/Image/Text, featuring performances of visual poetry by Christine Wertheim, Douglas Kearney and Martin Gubbins (Thursday, 11:30-1)
  • Fictions of Art/Arts of Fiction, a reading and panel exploring fiction’s relation to the visual arts, featuring National Book Award winner Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Benjamin Weissman, Janet Sarbanes, David Kress and DimitriAnastosopoulos (Thursday 2:30-3:45)
  • Lyrical Visions: Use of the Image in Contemporary Poetics, featuring Diana Arterian, Amaranth Borsuk, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Robin Coste Lewis and John Pluecker (Thursday 4-5:15)
  • Transfers, a panel on the tendencies of conceptual and post-conceptual writing to transfer the language of the arts to the language of the page, featuring Vincent Broqua, Olivier Brossard, Frances Richard, Martin GlazSerup (Friday 10-11:15)
  • Performing Typo-Graphic Literature, featuring Warren Lehrer, Danny Cannizzaro, Johanna Drucker, Samantha Gorman (Friday, 2:30-3:45 pm)
  • Contemporary Book Arts: Analog Technologies and Alternative Economies, featuring Anne M. Royston, Michael Cross, Chris Dunsmore, April Sheridan (Friday, 11:30-1)
  • Power, Slippage and the Visual: The Spaces of Fiction in a Visual Culture, a reading and panel considering fiction’s relationship to visual culture (social media, narrative television, cinema and internet browsing), featuring Gregory Howard, Amina Cain, Adam Novy and Deb Olin Unfurth (Saturday 10-11:15).

Writing and Lens-based Media

  • Language in Video Art Now, a screening of video art that features political speech, literary work, or invented narrative, featuring Maggie Nelson, Danielle Dean, Harry Dodge, Mariah Garnett, Dylan Mira, Tyler Oyer (Thursday 4-5:15)
  • With What Tongue, a performance and video screening featuring the work of Carmina Escobar and Eve Luckring (Friday 2:30-3:45)
  • (Dis)Embodiment: Digital Performance Remix, a series of performances, readings and screenings that make use of bodies both as the form and the content, featuring Ali Rachel Pearl, Amber Bernak, Raphael Dagold, Matt Kirkpatrick (Friday 2:30-3:45)

Writing andPerformance

  • Into the Fray, featuring text adapted from Thomas Fick’s novel The Iron Boys and Vicki Ray’s signature prepared-piano soundscapes. (1:30-2:30 pm)
  • Rose Secoming, an image-music-text performance responding to the experience of female aging, and featuring the legendary Pauline Oliveros, Celia Bland, ShiraDentz, Kathy High (Friday 2:30-3:45)

Writing as a Digital Practice:

  • Data-Driven Literary Practices, a panel on generating new literatures via representing, interpreting and contextualizing “Big Data,” featuring VJ Um Arnel, Jeremy Hight, Erik Loyer, and Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz (Thursday 4-5:15)
  • Feminist Poetics and the Internet, a performative presentation and roundtable conversation with simultaneous anti-surveillance hair & makeup party demo, featuring Kate Durbin, BeccaKlaver, Monica McClure, Stephanie Strickland, Jennifer Tamayo, Stephanie Young (Thursday 11:30-1)
  • Narrative Fragments: Art, Language, Algorithm, a panel on language on the Internet, how it is created, by whom, where it exists, and how it is used, featuring Mimi Cabell, Orit Gat, Jason Huff, Nicholas O’Brien, Clement Valla (Friday 4-5:15)
  • Hybrid Storytelling: Making New Narratives Using the Tools of Design, presentation focusing on a new approach to narrative and narrative design which usese graphic elements and design strategies to arrive at hybrid image/texts, with Zach Dodson and SakuHeinanen (Thrusday, 11:30-1)

Border crossings:

  • Transconceptualisms/Transconceptualismos: Emergent Poetics in Spanish, four Spanish-speaking experimental writers shed light on the context of global conceptualisms – featuring Marco Antonio Huerta, Roman Lujan, Hugo Garcia Manriquez, Sara Uribe (Friday 11:30-1)
  • How to Traffic in Books (And Trace that Traffic), small press editorial practices in both Californias, featuring Jen Hofer, John Pluecker, Rene Castillo, Jessica Ceballos, Chiwan Choi, Peter Woods (Thursday, 11:30- 1)
  • Border Tracing/Imaginary Geographies, with Samiya Bashir, Hilary Mushkin, PepeRojo, Stephanie Sauer (Saturday 2:30-3:45)
  • And Those That Don’t Survive?,a panel on diasporic poetics, featuring Ching-In Chen, Carina GiaFarrero, Soham Pate (Thursday 11:30-1)
  • Deep Sitings and Rescue Missons, a panel celebrating the African diasporicArkHive, with Tisa Bryant, Tonya Foster, Melanie Sherazi (Saturday 10-11:15)
  • Volatile Translations, a panel taking up the question, what does a translation do? How does it move across boundaries and bodies? With Johannes Goransson, Christian Hawkey, Jen Hofer, Lucas de LIma

Boundary-crossing, literary, psychic, and paranormal:

  • Bad Boundaries, panel and reading exploring “bad boundaries” and the potential for collaboration and connection therein, with Dodie Bellamy, Stephen van Dyck, Sam Cohen, Megan Milks, MatiasViegener (Thursday 2:30-3:45)
  • Postrealism and its Discontents: Acker/Burroughs, panel exploring the possibilities the writing of Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs suggests for “cut culture,” materiality and embodiment in the digital age, with Davis Schneiderman, Dodie Bellamy, Joshua Corey, Janet Sarbanes(Friday 4-5:15)
  • Divination as Praxis, a roundtable discussion on the use of divinatory practices in writing and writing experiments, with Emerson Whitney, Gina Abelkop, CA Congrad, BhanuKapil, Selah Saterstrom, MadySchutxman (Friday 4-5:15)
  • Occult Geographies, a performative reading that asks how the occult conteststhe narratives lived as and through our bodies, with Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Teresa Carmody, Andrea Quaid (Friday 2:30-3:45)
  • Marvelous Trash: Fan Fiction and Conceptualism, a panel staging an encounter between fan fiction and conceptual writing, with Johannes Goransson, Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, JoyelleMc Sweeney, Megan Milks, Vanessa Roveta (Saturday 4-5:15)

Writing Space

  • Resonances & Repetitions: Poetic Reverie and Space, a panel exploring the relationship between flesh, sense and landscape in the writing practice, with Gaston Bachelard’s canonical texts as a departure point, featuring Janice Lee, Amanda Ackerman, SeuyuenUliet Lee, ShoshanaSeidman, Laura Vena (Friday 11:30-1)
  • Apocalypse Now, Or Nearly: Folding Future & Present Together, In Imagining the Climate Crisis, a roundtable reading and discussion of “Cli-fi,” fiction addressing the current climate crisis, with John Domini, Matt Bell, Christina Milletti (Friday 4-5:15)
  • Now+Then Infrastructure,image/textpresentations on the physical and imaginary infrastructure of Los Angeles, with Ken Ehrlich, Marina Peterson, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Sara Kanouse

The ten “sited events” that will occur during the lunch and dinner breaks, include

-Writing on It All: A Neo- Formal Happening, a collaborative session that projects bureaucratic forms onto the walls and invites participants to fill them out – wrong. With Alexandra Chasin and Olga Rogriguez-Ulloa

-Un TextoSobre Arte Contemporaneo?A Text About Contemporary Art. In 3 three-hour writing sessions, Guido Ignatti will write a text on contemporary art, in a room, alone, using only a typewriter. This writing scene will be streamed, via webcam, to &NOW participants. When the document is done, Ignatti will glue the pages together and present it as a framed wall text so that only the first page is visible.

-Between Language and Body: Incubating a New Work, featuring Laura Ann Samuelson and BhanuKail incubating works of dance and text simultaneously, engaging participants

-The Which Witch Writer-in-Residence Program at the Saugus Café. Jen Hutton, Emma Kemp and Adriana Widdoes situate their roster of writers at the Saugus Café, to produce a text via a rolling residency period over the course of the festival.

Full registration for all three and a half days of the conference may be purchased for $100. A day rate of $35 is also available

To see the complete schedule or register, and for other details about the festival, including receptions and special events, food, directions and accommodations, visit andnow2015.com.For press inquiries, contact Janet Sarbanes, (213-925-8946).