Hexentexte presents Hyena
Thursday, October 3
Doors: 7pm
Event: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives
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Hexentexte press presents a book release event for HYENA, edited by Cindy Rehm and Adrienne Walser, with readings by Amina Cain, Robert Nashak, Deborah Meadows, Larkin Maureen Higgins, Sara Ellen Fowler, Jen D’Mello, Adele Bertei, and Danielle VonLehe.
Edited by Cindy Rehm and Adrienne Walser, the publication includes texts and images that look to the legacy of women’s surrealism, explorations of identity, inner-life, corporeality, ritual, eroticism, animality, and mortality. Inspired by Leonora Carrington, we take the hyena as our emblem given her feral and ravenous nature, her ability to provoke gender and identity mix-ups, and her proclivity for habitation in matriarchal clans. HYENA offers visions of possibility as the book shapeshifts through surrealist renderings by over eighty contributors working in text and image.
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Hyena Editors:
Adrienne Walser is Los Angeles-based writer and educator. She writes about literature, film, and art with an interest in modernism and experiences related to the body, illness, and care. She has a doctorate in English from the University of Southern California and currently teaches at California State University, Los Angeles. Her chapbook, Entertainer of the Year Runner-Up was published by Placeholder Press in 2020 and her writing has appeared in Fence, Art Book Review, Jacket2, Film International, CARLA, Pastelegram and Entropy, for which she served as the Arts & Culture contributing editor. Her appreciation and sense of kinship with women surrealists originates from her studies and writing on early 20th century avant-garde women artists, poets, editors, and curators.
Cindy Rehm is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. She serves as co-facilitator of the Cixous Reading Group, and is co-founder of the feminist-centered projects Craftswoman House and Feminist Love Letters. She is the founder and former director of spare room, a DIY installation space in Baltimore, MD. In 2021, she launched HEXENTEXTE, a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text, and the body. Rehm’s interdisciplinary practice moves between drawing, performance, and video to address the cultural suppression of women’s narratives and the legacy of hysteria. Her book Transference was published by Curious Publishing in 2022, and The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding was published by HEXENTEXTE in 2024.
Hyena Contributors:
Amina Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, the short story collections Creature and I Go To Some Hollow, and a book on writing and reading entitled A Horse at Night. She lives in Los Angeles.
Robert Nashak is a Los Angeles based writer and digital media creator. He is co-facilitator with Cindy Rehm of the long-running Cixous Reading Group, which explores écriture féminine in contemporary women’s writing. His most recent publication “Museum as Interface Metaphor” was published in the New York Review of Architecture. A Fulbright Fellowship in the Netherlands during graduate work sparked a lifelong interest in Dutch history and culture. He teaches at the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania.
Deborah Meadows is an Emerita faculty member with California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo, and has published over a dozen books of poetry most recently Neo-bedrooms (Shearsman), and Lecture Notes: A duration poem in twelve parts (BlazeVOX [books]). A new collection titled Bumblebees is forthcoming from Roof Books (NY) www.deborahmeadows.com
Larkin Maureen Higgins is a poet/artist/professor emerita whose poetic & hybrid works can be found in Diagram, Notre Dame Review, Eleven Eleven, Chant de la Sirène Journal, Otoliths, elsewhere. Mindmade Books published her Of Traverse and Template (poems and logographic drawings). With Dusie Press she has two poetry chapbooks, Of Materials, Implements and c o m b - i n g m i n e - i n g s , plus the broadside “Soil Culture, Frankenstein—Grafted.” Additionally, her poems have been anthologized by University of Iowa Press & Tebot Bach. Higgins’ visual poetry is included in the Avant Writing Collection/The Ohio State University Libraries & has been exhibited at Counterpath Gallery (Denver), Otis College of Art & Design, others. Over the years, she has exhibited her artist’s books/objects & created text-driven performance art for venues such as Highways Performance Space, Counterpath, BC Space, & Rogue Machine Theatre at The Matrix.
Sara Ellen Fowler is the author of Two Signatures (University of Utah Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, as selected by Joan Naviyuk Kane. A recipient of a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, Sara holds a BFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. Her writing can be found in The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Gigantic Sequins, and Cream City Review, among others.
Jen D’Mello is an interdisciplinary artist and humanities advisor from southeast Los Angeles County. They earned their BA in English with an emphasis in writing and performance, and an MFA in Writing from the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts.
Adele Bertei is a storyteller. A founding member of musical insurrectionists the Contortions and personal assistant to Brian Eno, Bertei was lead singer for the Bloods, the first out, queer, all women-rock band. She played a lead character in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and films of Bertei reading her poetry (The Ragazzi Manifesto) and The Offenders belong to MOMA's permanent collection. As vocalist and songwriter she has worked with Tears for Fears, Thomas Dolby, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, Whitney Houston, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Sheena Easton, Oleta Adams, Lydia Lunch, and Sophie B. Hawkins. Published works include the compilation The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading by editor Eileen Myles, Peter and the Wolves (memoir, Smog Veil), Why Labelle Matters (University of Texas Press). and Twist:Tales of a Queer Girlhood (memoir, ZE Books). Upcoming books are Sinead O'Connor's Universal Mother (Bloomsbury), and No New York (Faber & Faber).
Danielle VonLehe is a landscape designer at TERREMOTO and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. She holds graduate degrees in Aesthetics & Politics from California Institute of the Arts and in Landscape Architecture & Urbanism from University of Southern California. She grew up on a multi-generational family wheat farm in eastern Washington State.