New Works: Raymond Luczak and Brad Walrond (original) (raw)
In-Person | Tuesday | January 14 | 7-9pm
Jan 14, 2025 | 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Free
In-Person | Tuesday | January 14 | 7-9pm
Join us for a night of readings from Raymond Luczak and Brad Walrond. Luczak’s Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss (Unbound Editions 2024) explores the dynamics of written English poetry and ASL gloss by communing with the animals living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Walrond’s Every Where Alien (Amistad and Moore Black Press 2024), catapults us to New York City mid-1990s, early-2000s to rebroadcast the black queer creative genius of marginalized communities.
Readings in Kray Hall, with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.
By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by our Community Agreement. Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room.
About the poets:
Raymond Luczak (pronounced with a silent “c”) is perhaps best known for his books, films, and plays. He was raised in Ironwood, a small mining town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Number seven in a family of nine children, he lost much of his hearing due to double pneumonia at the age of eight months. After high school graduation, Luczak went on to Gallaudet University, in Washington, D.C., where he earned a B.A. in English, graduating magna cum laude. He learned American Sign Language (ASL) and became involved with the deaf community, and won numerous scholarships in recognition of his writing, including the Ritz-Paris Hemingway Scholarship. He took various writing courses at other schools in the area, which culminated in winning a place in the Jenny McKean Moore Fiction Workshop at the George Washington University. In 1988, he moved to New York City. In short order, his play Snooty won first place in the New York Deaf Theater’s 1990 Samuel Edwards Deaf Playwrights Competition, and his essay “Notes of a Deaf Gay Writer” won acceptance as a cover story for Christopher Street magazine. Soon after Alyson Publications asked him to edit Eyes of Desire: A Deaf Gay & Lesbian Reader, which, after its appearance in June 1993, eventually nabbed two Lambda Literary Award finalist nominations (Best Lesbian and Gay Anthology, and Best Small Press Book). He hasn’t stopped since! In 2005, he relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he continues to write, edit, and publish.
By amplifying and interrogating the great power and contractions inherent to identity, Brad Walrond aims with his work to provoke futurist explorations of how we co-create historical, remembered, and imagined time. The urgency that suffuses his work asks how we can cultivate habitable futures worthy of the common threads of our human inheritance. Walrond’s debut collection, Every Where Alien, focuses on the author’s own Black queer exploration of the world, and how these experiences map onto the discovery of co-occurring art and resistance movements among New York City’s underground communities—communities like the New Black Arts Movement, the New York House Ballroom Scene, Black Rock Coalition, Underground house dance and music community, and the Black queer political arts and activist movements that arose in response to the ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Brad is native to Brooklyn, New York and currently resides with his partner in the Bronx. He began writing and performing at the age of 24 when commissioned to participate in a theater production curated by Harry Belafonte, and soon became one of the foremost writers and performers of the 1990s Black Arts Movement centered in New York City.
Admission Free with RSVP
Luczak and Walrond
6 Going
Last day to RSVP