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THE CONVERGENCE ZONE
from The Convergence Zone is a series of author readings, and artist talks and performances, sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.
from The Convergence Zone brings together sometimes peaceable, sometimes combustible, fronts of discovery and experiment.
from The Convergence Zone brings to the Seattle metropolitan area exciting writers and artists who "cross" and "trans" genres and media.
from The Convergence Zone discusses and performs written arts in an expanded field.
Readings, Talks and Performances
April 25, 2013 @ 8:00 p.m. in LB1-205, University of Washington Bothell
John Beer
Author John Beer and MFA faculty member Joe Milutis will open this Convergence Zone event with a discussion of experimental translation. Following the discussion, Beer will read from his work.
Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His chapbook Lucinda is just out from Spork Press. Beer earned his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Chicago. He teaches creative writing at Portland State University.
This event is free and open to the public.
April 16, 2013
Doug Jarvis
Doug Jarvis presents Gut Re-Actions, an ongoing series of performance actions that explore the potential of the human belly-brain as an instrument to engage in a relationship with ghosts and avatars. Drawing on his research into “ghosts and other non-material entities as audience for his work” and his participation in the avatar performance art group Second Front, and the art collective Noxious Sector, Jarvis will perform a new action, followed by an artist talk and public discussion.
In his individual and collective practice Jarvis develops projects that explore the boundaries of human perception. Gut Re-Actions furthers a dialogue he has initiated between ghosts, as a residual past, and avatars, as a projected future of human presence. He cites life-after-death research, and the phenomenon of “persistence of personality,” as inspiration to challenge our sense of where the human form starts and stops. In an age of digital technologies and analogue senses, Jarvis proposes that our belly-brain, the neural network present in our digestive system, can be mobilized to challenge material and non-material ways of knowing, and to engage with the potential of human agency in a variety of dimensions and forms.
An artist and curator living in Victoria, British Columbia, Jarvis earned his MFA in studio art from the University of Guelph, Ontario. He has attended a number of artist residencies and received multiple artist grants, and his individual and collective projects have shown at a variety of international and online sites. A founding member of the avatar performance art group Second Front and the Noxious Sector Art Collective, Jarvis is currently Guest Curator at Open Space Arts. Learn more from his website.
April 1, 2013
Kate Greenstreet
Kate Greenstreet's new book Young Tambling is just out from Ahsahta Press. Her previous books are case sensitive and The Last 4 Things, also with Ahsahta. Her poetry can be found in Colorado Review, Boston Review, Volt, Fence, Chicago Review and other journals. Links to her work in online publications are here. Her videos can be viewed in Medium, Dewclaw, Slope, Trickhouse and TYPO. More about Greenstreet's work can be found at her website.
February 2013
Jordan Scott
Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (New Star Books 2005) which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Blert (Coach House Books 2008). Blert, which explores the poetics of stuttering, was adapted into a short film for the Bravo Network and was the subject of an online interactive documentary commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada. Scott acted as writer in residence at the International Writers' and Translators' Centre in Rhodes, Greece, and has lectured and performed at festivals in the U.S., Norway and Slovenia. His areas of poetic inquiry are speech disfluencies, interrogation, found archives and decompositions. Scott is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/scott/
February 2013
Alexandra Chasin
Alexandra Chasin is the author of Brief, an interactive book published as an app for iPad; the medium is an integral part of the storyline. She received a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1993, and an MFA in Fiction Writing at Vermont College in 2002. She is the author of Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, a study of the relation between the LGBT "market" and the LGBT social movement. Her other books include Kissed By, a collection of formally innovative short fiction. Chasin is a past recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, and a 2012 Fiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Chasin teaches in the Literary Studies Department at Lang College, The New School. http://jadedibisproductions.com/BRIEF.html
January 2013
Nick Montfort
December 2012
Leonard Schwartz
November 2012
CA Conrad
The Convergence Zone is a place of wild and unpredictable weather because of converging weather fronts.
More information about readings from the Convergence Zone is available from Meredith Field.