Next Words: CalArts MFA 2022
NEXT WORDS
CalArts MFA 2022
~
Sunday, May 15 2022
2 - 6pm
~
The CalArts Creative Writing MFA 2022 graduating cohort presents, Next Words: an afternoon of art, readings, and performances on Sunday, May 15, 2-6:00 p.m. The event will launch our anthology, [of lust] rubber, which will be available for sale.
Featuring: Aaron Joseph, Jen D’Mello, Jennie E. Park, jimmy vega, Josh Wolpert, Julia Sáenz Lorduy, Nikki Ochoa, Rosa Evangelina (Beltrán), z.No Scott, and Anthony Garcia
~
Aaron Joseph is a poet, writer, and artist in Los Angeles. He sees writing as an artistic act and relates it to the recording and ontological nature of photography. His poems focus on word play and subversion to attempt and fail to rationalize the complexity of a digitalized and globalized world. His fiction explores fantasy and science fiction tropes through the lens of love.
Jen D’Mello is a speculative nonfiction writer, sound artist, performance artist and humanities advisor from Los Angeles County. They specialize in queer studies and hybridized writings.
Jennie E. Park is an artist, writer and curator interested in interdisciplinarity and integrated approaches to honesty. (In)visibility and (in)vulnerability, and world-generating dynamics of entanglement and of truthful paradox, recur as practices, tools or puzzles she explores in relation to her project-based work.
jimmy vega is the child of Mexican immigrants, a Chicanx L.A.-based poet, writer, educator, artist, and curator. He holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from UCLA and is an MFA candidate in the School of Critical Studies, Creative Writing Program at CalArts, where they co-created the MFA in Creative Writing’s HYPERLINK reading series. He is the Assistant Director of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts/Center.
Josh Wolpert (I) is a person and a writer from New York. At the time of this anthology, I've been alive for 36 years. I think it goes without saying, that the world around us is actually just made up of nebulous things that we choose to, or unknowingly keep invisible. Those are the things that I try to give a bit of life to.
Julia Sáenz Lorduy is a feminist text and textile artist from Bogotá, Colombia. She currently lives in L.A., having gone back and forth from Colombia to the U.S. throughout her life, exploring roots and autonomy. As an educator, she is deeply engaged with critical and creative ways of thinking in practices of self and community making. Her academic curiosity has led her to explore the disciplines of math, sociology and critical studies. As an educator and artist, she is currently devoted to the question: how do texts and textiles interweave with each other? Her thesis is an exploration of this question, which has propelled her into different projects aimed at converging the individual and the collective, the practice of writing in isolation, with collaborating in pieces if fabric as part of a sewing circle, the slanted nature of memory, with the collective notions of oblivion and remembrance, the personal notion of truth, with the collective of storytelling.
Nikki Ochoa is an ancient baby from kudzu covered forests. She is playing a wooden flute on the edge of your mind and beckoning you to join for a swim in the ever-flowing river of love.
Rosa Evangelina (Beltrán) is a Mexican-American vocalist, poet, and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work investigates the performative capabilities of voice, text, and movement, often activating language and energetic traces left behind by her ancestors, including her past selves. Currently she is pursuing an MFA in VoiceArts and Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. Rosa earned a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard, and is an alumna of the Los Angeles Valley College Applied Music Program in Voice. She grew up in Ontario, California and is a first generation college graduate in her family.
z.No Scott [he/him/itself] is a trans & afro-latinx wordsmith, educator, and woodworker based in LA, by way of Washington Heights. z.No’s latest collection, ynglytch, provokes ideas of orality and ownership through the use of d’colonial grammatiks, transgressive typography & graphic page design.
Anthony Garcia (He/But I’ll Never Be Him) is a writer of speculative fiction, bad poetry, and letters that will be burned.