New Writing Series Spring 2008

Tisa Bryant, Monday, April 14, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Writer, poet, and radical cineaste, Tisa Bryant's work often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history, splicing, juxtaposing and threading seemingly disparate elements from personal history, film, and observations as a global citizen, into multi-layered texts that demand new forms. Her first book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from Eurocentric film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. She is a founding editor/publisher of the hardcover annual, The Encyclopedia Project and teaches writing at St. John's University, Queens, NY.
Marjorie Welish, Wednesday, April 16, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship, the Howard Foundadtion Fellowship, and other prestigious  awards for poetry, Marjorie Welish is also a highly respected painter and art critic. Her new book of poems is Isle of the Signatories; Word Group is another recent work. A day-long conference on her art, poetry and art criticism occurred at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, which produced a 300-page book, Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought, 2003.)
Leslie Scalapino, Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. in the Literature Building, Room 155 (de Certeau)
	Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and plays. Fiction includes Defoe, poetry includes Zither & Autobiography, and Day Ocean State of Stars' Night. Her selected poems, It's go in horizontal, has just been published by UC Press, Berkeley.
Antoine Wilson, Wedneday, April 30, 2008, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel The Interloper. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, and Best New American Voices, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives and surfs in Los Angeles.
Kamau Daaood, Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 4:30-6:30 p.m., Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Poet Kamau Daaood is the author of The Language of Saxophones: Selected Poems of Kamau Daaood, Citylights Publishers, a finalist in the Southern California Book Award.  Kamau has performed his work at countless venues such as Dunya and North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, Earshot Jazz and Bumbershoot Festivals in Seattle, the Steppenwolf Theater and Guild Complex in Chicago, Getty and MOCA Museum in Los Angeles, National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta and the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
Camille F. Forbes, Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 4:30-6:30 p.m., Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
	Camille Forbes, historian and performer, is the author of Introducing Bert Wiliams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of American's First Black Star (Basic Civitas, 2008). Her life in performance has taken her from standup comedy acts in Boston to her ever-evolving one-woman stage piece, "Tales of Suburban Squalor," in San Diego. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

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