Full program video: soon
Video highlight clips: Syd Staiti reads from their work in manuscript | Trisha Low reads from Socialist Realism | Syd Staiti and Trisha Low respond to a question from the audience asking for a "scene report" on the Bay Area
Join us for what should be a terrific evening of readings and conversation with Bay Area poets Trisha Low and Syd Staiti. Co-sponsored by The Poetry Center and Women and Gender Studies, SF State, this event is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Free and open to the public.
Trisha Low is a poet and performer living in the East Bay. She earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in performance studies at New York University. She is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books/Coffee House Press, 2019). Photo: Kari Orvik.
- "In a pinch, I'd call the book an account of moving West—from Singapore, to New York, to California—a mixture of memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism. But it's also another perspective on a question I've been obsessed with—how can I account for my life? I still don't know, but I guess the book is, in part, about how, despite everything, life goes on. Every day, we get up. We always do. Some days, there is comfort in that." —Trisha Low, on Socialist Realism
- Diana Hamilton writes in Frieze that "Socialist Realism might itself be a parable, in that it dares the reader to interpret it too literally—mistaking the showing of a wound for vulnerability, or uncertainty about political or artistic effects for a lack of commitment—but I count myself among the believers."
Syd Staiti is author of The Undying Present (Krupskaya 2015) and chapbook In the Stitches (Trafficker 2015). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Tripwire, Amerarcana, Open Space, and The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman 2017). Staiti has been involved with The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, Small Press Traffic, and the film collective Light Field.