Ryan Ward will speak about the lives of Outsider artists versus those engaged in various types of artist communities. J. Morgan Puett will read excerpts from “Workstyles” in “The User’s Guide to Mildred’s Lane,” the forthcoming 2025 publication. David Kener will present anecdotes, Hebrew scripture, and outdoor sculpture revolving around “Eden.”
Join us for an engaging conversation with acclaimed writers Vivian Gornick, Ada Calhoun, and Tricia Romano as they delve into the rich tapestry of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods as the locus for brief encounters and quixotic discoveries, as well as the role of New York as a creative wellspring for writers, artists, and thinkers, as exemplified in Tricia Romano’s new book, The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture, in Calhoun’s St. Marks Is Dead, a history of St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, Manhattan, and Gornick’s influential memoir, Fierce Attachments.
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Weaving story-telling and song, Curtis Zunigha will open the festival this year, and welcome us all to Lenapehoking. His story includes the forced removals of his Lenape ancestors from their indigenous homelands located between what’s now New York City and Philadelphia. Then the Lenape were called Delaware by the colonizers and pushed onto reservations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario Canada. Curtis’s return to the Lenape homeland represents an act of reclamation…of culture, identity, and heritage.
Curtis will also be reading excerpts from the book “Lenapehoking: An Anthology,” a publication of Lenape Center and the Brooklyn Public Library. The first 100 tickets sold will come with a free copy of the anthology and all proceeds of the event will benefit Lenape Center.
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“When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.” Antiguan-American essayist and novelist Jamaica Kincaid has redefined the genre of garden writing with My Garden (Book), Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas, and now in collaboration with artist Kara Walker An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Jamaica will be joined by Emily Greenhouse for a very special conversation about the garden as a site of creativity, personal discovery, and engagement with (and not refuge from), the larger socio-political issues of our time.
Photo courtesy of Jamaica Kincaid
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Award winning film-maker Matt Wolf joins Cynthia Carr, author of the recently published and critically acclaimed Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, to examine the role of world-building in the creation of biography. Wolf is currently completing a multi part documentary on Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman. What breadcrumbs does a biographer choose to collect on the many intersecting and sometimes contradictory paths of their subject’s story?
Film still of Candy Darling from Der Tod Der Maria Braun
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Emmy award winning local author Janus Adams sits in conversation with leading American historian Nell Irvin Painter and PEN nominated author Aaron Robertson, to reflect on the experimental spaces and imaginitive ways Black Americans have dreamed of better worlds. Robertson’s non-fiction debut The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, is forthcoming in October 2024, whilst Nell Irvin Painter’s latest publication I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays was released this spring.
Artwork: Self Portrait by Nell Irvin Painter
