A Double Header
Sunday, March 4th
1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Cake Mix: Instant Theatre
A workshop for youngsters 12 and up with Mino Lora, artistic director of the People’s Theatre Project, and Veronica Liu, director of Seven Stories Institute. Theme: “My Neighborhood”
4:00 p.m.
Readings by 2012 Literary Grantees of the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance
Lola Koundakjian
Veronica Liu
Paquita Suárez Coalla
Suggested donation of $7 for adults includes free drinks and snacks and reception to meet the writers. Kids free.
Donation covers both events and will benefit Voces/Voices, a theatre and writing program for teens co-developed by People’s Theatre Project and Seven Stories Institute.
Sunday Best Reading Series
Performances by fiction writers, poets, dramatists, memoir writers and spoken-word composers
The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens
Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street
Performances by fiction writers, poets, dramatists, memoir writers and spoken-word composers
The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens
Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street
Lola Koundakjian is an Armenian poet who has lived in New York City since 1979. She is the author of The Accidental Observer, a book of poems in three languages—Armenian, Spanish, and English. Her poetry has appeared online in alpialdelapalabra (Argentina), Armenian Poetry Project (New York City), The Literary Groong (University of Southern California),Mediterranean.nu (Sweden) and UniVerse (Chicago). Poems have also appeared in theAnthology Memoria del XX Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellin (Colombia), Armenian Weekly (Boston) and Pakin (Beirut, Lebanon). Lola has read her work in Los Angeles, Rhode Island and New York City's Cornelia Street Café, Bowery Poetry Club, UN Correspondents Association, the Northern Manhattan's Art Alliance's 2010 Art Stroll, and the Above The Bridge series on Bennett Avenue. Her work was translated into Spanish for the 20th International Poetry Festival in Medellín, Colombia where she read in 2010. For the past 20 years, Lola has organized evenings dedicated to the Dead Armenian Poets' Society, and since 2006 has produced and edited text and audio for the multi-lingual Armenian Poetry Project.
Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Mino Lora has been living and working as an actor, director, teaching artist and arts administrator in NYC since 2000. During her tenure with People’s Theatre Project, which she co-founded, the organization has won the prestigious Union Square Arts Award and Lora has received The Creative Power of Women Award from State Senator Bill Perkins for her “Outstanding work as a woman in the Arts”. She has been featured in newspaper and magazine publications in New York City and the Dominican Republic and has been invited to speak on various panels throughout New York City to share her experience as a Latina artist working to build community through theatre. Mino received her BA in English Literature and Theatre from Manhattanville College and her MA in Peace Studies and Conflict Transformation from the Graduate Institute. She also holds a certification as a peace mediator from the Washington Heights-Inwood Coalition. Mino and the People’s Theatre Project “firmly believe in theatre as a means for social change and are committed to creating a more just and peaceful world through powerful art.”
Veronica Liu’s writing, comics, photography, and silkscreen prints have been published inBroken Pencil, Quick Fiction, Get Ahead, and Pax Americana. Her short films have been screened at LadyFest East and the Arlene Grocery Picture Show, and her radio show Far Too Canadian was featured in the Village Voice Best of New York 2001. An audio collage piece that Veronica created in 2008 in St. Petersburg and Moscow will be released on Palanquin Records in the near future. Locally, she has presented her work at KGB Bar, South Street Seaport’s Melville Gallery, Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, Pete’s Candy Store, Happy Ending, and La Pregunta. She has received grants from Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Manhattan Community Arts Fund, New Yorkers for Better Neighborhoods/Citizens Committee of New York City, and the Goodman Fund, and she has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction and Family Matters awards. Veronica is cofounder of Fractious Press, Word Up community bookshop, and Washington Heights Free Radio (WHFR.org). She has been on the organizing committee for the New York State Council on the Arts’s literature division convenings since 2007, and director of the non-profit Seven Stories Institute since 2010. By day, she works as an editor at Seven Stories Press.
Paquita Suárez Coalla is a Spanish writer and a professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College (City University of New York). She is co-founder of Latino Artists Round Table (LART), a cultural group that organizes readings and conferences of Hispanic writers from all the different regions of Latin America, the United States and Spain. She has published two books of short stories in Asturian, her native language. Pa nun escaeceme has been translated into Spanish--Para que no se me olvide--and English--So I Won’t Forget. El día que nos llevaron al cine has been translated into Spanish--La mio vida ye una novela. It is based on testimonies depicting the life of rural women from Asturias. Paquita is also the editor of the anthology Aquí me tocó escribir, an anthology of New York Latino writers; her work has been included in the anthology Dos orillas: Voces en la narrativa lésbica / Two Shores: Voices in Lesbian Narrative. As a literary critic she published in 1994, in México, the book La literatura fantástica en la obra de Adolfo Bioy Casares.
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Sunday Best Curator, Patrizia Eakins, 212-923-7800, x1342
Wines donated by Vines on Pine.
Videography: Art by DJ Boy.
Podcasts of Sunday Best events at www.whfr.org/
