The Broad Stage at Home Presents Red Hen Press Poetry Hour Regarding Feminism

The Broad Stage and esteemed LA-based publisher Red Hen Press continues season two of the Red Hen Press Poetry Hour with an online episode on Thursday, September 24 at 6pm PT in which host Sandra Tsing Loh leads a program with five unique artists about the intersections between feminism, performance, identity and poetry in the time following the #MeToo Movement.

Poets and writers appearing on the program include Erica Jong (on tape), whose first and most famous novel, Fear of Flying, published in 1973 sold 37 million copies, blowing conventional thinking about women, marriage and sexuality out of the water; Judy Grahn, a foremother of feminist, the gay and lesbian liberation movement; Brooklyn based gender-liminal multi- and inter-disciplinary artist C. Bain, whose Debridement (Great Weather for Media) was a finalist for the 2016 Publishing Triangle Awards; and Pushcart Prize nominee and Jack Straw Writer Program alum Amber Flame, a queer Black mama just one magic trick away from growing her unicorn horn.

The guest list is completed with Monique Jenkinson known for her herstory-making work as cis-gendered drag queen Fauxnique, crossing cabaret and contemporary dance; Fauxnique's The F Word will perform at The Broad Stage in 2021.

The theory of feminism started as early as 24 centuries ago with Plato and continues to comprise the narratives of the ideologies and movements that aim at equal rights and opportunities for women especially as we celebrate a century of women's suffrage.

This second season of virtual programming brings together performing artists and poets to explore themes central to works featured in The Broad Stage's 2020/21 Season. Red Hen Press Poetry Hour is part of The Broad Stage at Home, original monthly programming via the online portal that will broadcast through December.

At livestream time, the broadcast is found on The Broad Stage website at thebroadstage.org/athome and on Facebook at facebook.com/thebroadstage. Each program is archived following the live stream for on-demand viewing.

Red Hen Press Poetry Hour has included readings from California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, Richard Blanco, who was selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Utah Paisley Rekdal, and 2019 NAACP Image Poetry Awards nominee Allison Joseph, two-time winner of the PEN Literary Award for Children's Literature.

About the Guests

C. Bain is a gender liminal artist. His book of poetry, Debridement, was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle awards. His writing appears in BOAAT, Bedfellows Magazine, PANK, them, Muzzle Magazine, the Everyman's Library book Villanelles, the Rumpus.net and elsewhere. He has a long history in slam and performance poetry, and his plays and performance art works have been presented at Dixon Place, The Tank, The Kraine, The Living Gallery, and the LGBT Center in NYC. He has been an apprentice at Ugly Duckling Presse and a Lambda Literary fellow. More at tiresiasprojekt.com

Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary creative, activist and educator whose work has garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame's work is published widely and explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and interstitial joy. A 2016 and 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee and Jack Straw Writer Program alum, Amber Flame's first full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame was a recipient of the CityArtist grant from Seattle's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to write, produce and perform her one-person play, Hands Above the Covers. In early 2018, Flame co-curated the art installation Black Imagination at Core Gallery in Seattle. Her first solo exhibit debuted in 2019 with a project entitled ::intrigue:: 8, a multimedia installation, through Jack Straw Production's Artist Support and New Media Gallery fellowships. Hugo House's 2017-2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry, Flame's second book of poetry, titled apocrifa, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Flame has created and implemented programming for more than 15 years, working in education equity, Black media, youth empowerment, and with women and youth impacted by incarceration. Recently named Program Director for Hedgebrook, she continues to work as a writing instructor while working on a third collection of poetry, remounting her full-length play, developing a few nonfiction anthologies, and raising her daughter. Amber Flame is a queer Black mama just one magic trick away from growing her unicorn horn.

Judy Grahn is a poet, writer, teacher, and cultural theorist; foremother of feminist, gay, and lesbian liberation movements and of the field of women's spirituality. Earlier nonfiction books include Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds, and Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Her memoir is A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet. Two collections of her poetry from Red Hen Press, and also The Judy Grahn Reader from Aunt Lute Books, are available. In 2000, she received her PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she is Distinguished Associated Professor. In 1996, The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction was established by Publishing Triangle in New York; in 2016, the My Good Judy art and scholar residency was established in New Orleans. Grahn's work has been anthologized in collections from W. W. Norton & Company, Penguin Books, Penngrove, and Oxford University Press, among many others. She has received several lifetime achievement and foremother awards and has been Grand Marshall of two Gay Pride Parades. The Commonality Institute promotes her work overall, while a Metaformia journal archive at www.metaformia.org, retains articles on her Metaformic Theory. Her love of creatures and spirit is lifetime. She lives with her spouse in Palo Alto, CA.

Monique Jenkinson is an artist, performer, choreographer and writer. Jenkinson made herstory as the first cis-woman to win a major drag queen pageant; subsequently her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in wide-ranging contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums - from Joe's Pub, New Museum and the historic Stonewall in New York City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, The Stud, CounterPulse and de Young Museum in San Francisco, and in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Provincetown, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Zürich, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, Catania and Cork.

Jenkinson said, "Since 2003 I have been deeply engaged in an ongoing performance project, my drag queen persona Fauxnique. As a lens through which I magnify my artistic concerns, Fauxnique typifies and expands the evolution of drag-based performance and furthers the feminist line of inquiry in my work. As Fauxnique, I approach the established tradition of the drag lip-sync as a dance in its own right, and bring to it the rigor of my dance training. I am on the vanguard of what is now a common practice: museums and larger institutions embracing nightclub culture as queer history and contemporary art practice."

She continued, "My work exists at the crossroads of Cabaret and Contemporary Dance and considers the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable and subversive act. I emerged out of a feminist, postmodern, improvisational dance and choreographic lineage, and grew toward a tradition of radical queer performance that uses decadence and drag both to entertain and transcend. My practice of feminism celebrates glamour as masterful artifice, and my intimacy with both the oppressive and empowering effects of feminine tropes allows me to create a zone of play from which I make my particular critique."

She has created space for kids to dress drag queens at a major museum and created college curricula; she played the Dirt (originated by Justin Vivian Bond) in Taylor Mac's Lily's Revenge and Eurydike in Anne Carson's Antionick. She engaged in public conversation with Gender Studies luminary Judith Butler and RuPaul bestie Michelle Visage within days of each other. She is currently writing a memoir. Honors include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Tanzhaus Zürich and Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Irvine Fellowship and residency at the de Young Museum, GOLDIE and BESTIE awards and 7X7 Magazine's Hot 20. She has been nominated for the Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance (IZZIE) and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and have received support from San Francisco Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CHIME, Center for Cultural Innovation and the Kenneth Rainin and Zellerbach Family foundations.

Erica Jong is a celebrated poet, novelist & essayist with over twenty-five published books that have been influential all over the world. Her most popular novel, Fear of Flying, celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2013. Never out of print, it has sold over thirty-five million copies translated into over forty-five languages including Chinese and Arabic. Erica's latest novel, Fear of Dying, was published in 2015/2016 with many publishers all over the world. Her awards include the Fernanda Pivano Award for Literature in Italy (named for the critic who introduced Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, and Erica Jong to the Italian public), the Sigmund Freud Award in Italy, the Deauville Literary Award in France, the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature, and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize (also won by Sylvia Plath and W.S. Merwin). Erica's poetry has appeared in publications worldwide, including the New Yorker, the LA Times, the Paris Review, Haaretz, and many more. Erica lives in New York and Connecticut with her husband and two poodles.

Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of six books, including The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (2014, W.W. Norton), which was selected as one of The New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books. It is based on her piece on menopause in The Best American Essays 2012, originally published in The Atlantic. The Madwoman in the Volvo inspired Sandra's hit play of the same name, as well as her stand-up show, The B***h Is Back: An All-Too Intimate Conversation, which ran at The Broad Stage in 2015. Her new book The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem will be published by W.W. Norton in June 2020.

Red Hen Press, one of the few literary presses in the Los Angeles area, was founded in 1994 by Kate Gale and Mark E. Cull with the intention of keeping creative literature alive. Our focus as a literary press is to publish poetry, literary fiction, and nonfiction. Red Hen Press is committed to publishing work of literary excellence, supporting diversity, and promoting literacy in our local schools. We seek a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature.

Red Hen Press offers several literary awards each year, including the Benjamin Saltman Award. The winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award receives a cash prize in addition to publication of the winning poetry collection. Past judges include: Claudia Rankine, Robin Becker, Wanda Coleman, B.H. Fairchild, Nick Flynn, Eloise Klein Healy, David St. John, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Philip Levine, Alicia Ostriker, James Ragan, Peggy Shumaker, and Quincy Troupe. Other awards offered include the Red Hen Press Short Fiction Award, Women's Prose Prize, Quill (Queer) Prose Award, Nonfiction Award, and Novella Award. Red Hen Press is also committed to promoting literacy in the community. Beyond developing an appreciation of literature, we believe it is essential to our society to promote a readership that remains open and critically engaged in reading a variety of well-written, thought-provoking work. Our Writing in the Schools program brings writers into schools to run writing workshops and to read and discuss their work-promoting both literacy and creative expression among young people. We organize readings in schools, universities, libraries, and literary organizations. We donate books to a variety of organizations, including schools and facilities that educate at-risk youth.

The Broad Stage gathers artists, thinkers and audiences to celebrate our shared humanity and expand the role the arts play in the vitality of our diverse community. As a presenter and producer of performing arts affiliated with Santa Monica College, The Broad Stage brings a bold array of renowned local, national and International Artists across dance, theatre, humanities, classical, jazz and popular music, to the Westside of Los Angeles each year. In addition, our immersive Education & Community programs serve thousands of schoolchildren and families, and provide ongoing opportunities for SMC students and faculty to directly engage with the art and artists.

The Broad Stage primarily utilizes the state-of-the-art venues at Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center including The Eli & Edythe Broad Stage main stage, The Edye Second Space and The East Wing, and also increasingly brings a variety of site-specific work and community programs to spaces across the Westside. The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage main stage is unlike any performance space in the country; it is sublimely intimate with just over 500 seats yet strikingly grand in its feel, boasting one of the city's largest proscenium stages. The 100-seat black box Edye Second Space and the versatile East Wing are adaptable performing spaces allowing for a wide variety of artists and experiences.

Editors please note when referring to our venue, we are appropriately The Broad Stage (three words) and we are located in Santa Monica, California. The Broad (two words) refers to the contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.

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