Thread Makes Blanket
April 9, 2016, 2PM

Thread Makes Blanket (Philadelphia) will host a chapbook publication release of “Treasure My Black Rupture” a collection of poems by Anna Martine Whitehead imagining Blackness as a multiverse, containing black holes, time loops, ghosts, space sex and more.

With Anna Martine Whitehead, Marie Alarcon, Cynthia Dewi Oka, and Roger Reeves
and emceed by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela

This event is a part of Organize Your Own: the Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, on view at the Averill and Bernard Leviton Gallery March 3-April 9, 2016. This exhibition features new work by contemporary artists and poets responding to archival materials related to the history of white people organizing their own working-class white neighborhoods in Philadelphia (the October 4th Organization) and Chicago (the Young Patriots Organization) in keeping with the mandate from the Black Power movement to “organize your own” community against racism.

For a full list of events, visit: https://organizeyourown.wordpress.com/events/

Thread Makes Blanket is a small press that embarks on collaborations with artists and authors to produce books of substance and beauty. www.threadmakesblanket.com

ANNA MARTINE WHITEHEAD
Anna Martine is an artist, writer, choreographer, and curator. She makes solos and collaborative work interrogating race, gender, time, and loss at the limits of performance.

Anna Martine has shown work throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. In addition to her choreographic and solo work, Martine has worked collaboratively or made significant contributions to the work of Keith Hennessy, Jesse Hewit, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Julien Previeux, and Spiral Q Puppet Theater. She maintains ‘Endurance Tests,’ a recurring column in Art Practical exploring Black creative practice. She will be featured in the forthcoming anthology Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance, and is releasing a chapbook through Thread Makes Blanket Press later this year. She has co-produced VAST LANDSCAPE, an ongoing open sound-and-movement studio in LA and Chicago; and movement//movement, a social justice based practice space in Detroit via the Allied Media Conference. She is the recent recipient of a Chances Dances Critical Fierceness award and a High Concept Labs Sponsored Artist Fellowship.

Anna Martine holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and has lectured there as well as School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal State East Bay. Visit annamartine.com for more.

CYNTHIA DEWI OKA
Cynthia Dewi Oka was born and raised in Bali, Indonesia, migrated to Canada when she was 10 years old, then later to the US. Originally a painter and pianist by training, she turned to poetry as a young adult to explore and communicate experiences of displacement. At 17, she gave birth to her son, and subsequently put herself through college as a single working mother.

With a background in community organizing around issues of migrant justice, Indigenous sovereignty, violence against women, and gentrification, Cynthia is passionate about amplifying the poetics and poetry that emerge from vulnerable/marginalized communities. She has performed at venues such as The New School, Bluestockings, Bus Boys and Poets, La Mama Experimental Theatre, The Free Library of Philadelphia, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, and Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

ROGER REEVES
Awarded a 2014-2015 Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a 2014 Pushcart Prize, a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Roger Reeves’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, and 2014 Pushcart Prize. King Me, his first book of poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

MARIE ALARCON
Marie Alarcon is a multimedia and sound performance artist based in Philadelphia, Pa. They have an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and have been working in community media as an educator and producer for the past 10 years. Alarcon is currently a CFEVA Fellowship Finalist, and has shown work at Franz Josephs Kai III in Vienna Austria, The Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, and has performed at the ICA Philadelphia and the Print Center.

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