Full-program video: Brontez Purnell and Tommy Pico: September 13, 2018
Video highlight clips: Brontez Purnell, "Me vs. The Writer" | Tommy Pico reads from Feed, in manuscript
A terrific evening, with friends and fellow Whiting Award 2018 recipients (respectively, for poetry and fiction) Tommy Pico and Brontez Purnell, reading and in conversation with one another and the audience. This event supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Free and open to the public.
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL (Birds LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), and Junk (Tin House Books, 2018). He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry, and NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he’s the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literature Prize. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.
Brontez Purnell, whose “explorations of blackness, queerness, maleness, and Southernness take sharp, confident turns between raunch and rhapsody,” has been publishing, performing, and curating in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than ten years as founder of cult zine Fag School, frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, and the founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He has performed at venues such as New York Live Arts Festival, YBCA, SFMOMA, Counterpulse, and The Lab. His most recent book, Since I Laid My Burden Down (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017) won a 2018 Whiting Award for fiction.