Join us for a live virtual reading with Julietta Cheung, Hereaclitus Vernon, Joshua Demaree, and Rachel Herman. The Open Door series presents work from new and emerging poets and highlights writing instruction and poetic partnerships. Each event features readings by two Midwestern based writers and two of their current or recent students or writing partners.

Julietta Cheung is an artist with a text-based and language-inspired practice. Her work draws from her experience as a second language user and her background in design. Through textual appropriations, typographic experimentations, reading performances, and sculptural works, Cheung unmakes and remakes familiar cultural narratives to examine their collective fabulations. Her work has been published or exhibited by Kenning Editions, tripwire: a journal of poetics, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Chicago Artists Coalition, and many other independent venues across the US. An upcoming work will be seen in the streets of Chicago with Roman Susan Art Foundation as a partner program for The Available City of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Cheung is an assistant professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hereaclitus “Here” Vernon (they/them) b.1968 is a Gender-Queer Chicago-based Trans/disciplinary Poet, Pleasure Artist, and Radical Emotionalist. Hereaclitus is interested in what Shannon Bell refers to as, “Fast Feminism” and their “Gustemverks” over the last 30 years that mash-up sexual politics, identity, and meta-physical philosophy. Re-named after the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus that said, “The only thing constant is change” in 400 B.C. Hereaclitus, in 2012, was named the artist “whose life is probably an artwork” by New City. They were recently awarded grants for experimental art through the Foundation for Contemporary arts and through the Arts Relief Fund awarded by American Artists. “I am interested in meta-tooling, crow-core, and biodynamic praxis. It is only through intense authentic intimacy that we are actually political. My mysticism is a supplement to a dialectic and an expanded pedagogy, but it is always asking, longing, begging, telling, and simultaneously. I think that is seduction.”

Joshua Demaree was born and raised in central Pennsylvania. He has earned an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–Camden. He is a cofounder of Blue Stoop, a nonprofit dedicated to nurturing an inclusive literary community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by creating pathways to access writing education, inspiration, and professional support. In 2019, Blue Stoop was honored by Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy for its literary organizing work. Currently, he is the director of the 215 Festival, Philadelphia’s literary arts festival founded in 2001. He spends his days working as a medical editor and lives in Media, Pennsylvania.

Rachel Herman (she | they) is an artist educator, healer, and writer living in Kansas City, MO. Rachel learns and makes work about intangible states (love, grief, interconnectedness). She is currently working on her first book, Float Chandelier Float, about perceptual shifts in time and space while mourning and is curating an exhibition of lost (now found) paintings that explore the concept of ma, a Japanese term for light and space in the world next door to ours, by Topeka artist Audrey Leamon. Rachel studied visual art and visual theory at the University of Chicago and literature at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and introduces first-year students to Chicago and its history through photographs at DePaul University. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Anderson Ranch, Light Work, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. She is a certified Reiki Master and Reiki Phowa practitioner.

Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This reading will include live captioning and ASL interpretation. If you require any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing events@poetryfoundation.org.

A Zoom link will be provided to Eventbrite registrants the day of the event.
Register here.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Chicago, Hereaclitus Vernon, Joshua DEMAREE, julietta cheung, Near North Side, Open Door Reading Series Online, Poetry Foundation, Rachel Herman, Virtual