A Reading and Mini-Workshop Celebrating “Experiments in Joy: A Workbook“,
published by Co-Conspirator Press
Sunday, February 23, 2020 // 2–4pm
Featuring Gabrielle Civil and a Conversation with Mandy Harris Williams
at the Owl Bureau (Off-site) in Highland Park
Free

Join us for a Sunday afternoon mini-workshop led by Gabrielle Civil celebrating Co-Conspirator Press’s Experiments in Joy: A Workbook. She is joined in conversation by WCCW Programming Director, Mandy Harris Williams. Books Experiments in Joy and Experiments in Joy: A Workbook will be available for sale. 

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world, including her year-long project “In & Out of Place” as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and her “Fugue” trilogy after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Since May 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Art21, Something on Paper, Kitchen Table Translation, Obsidian, and other publications. She is the author of two memoirs in performance art: Swallow the Fish (2017) and Experiments in Joy (2019). She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and currently serves as Faculty in the MFA program in Creative Writing and the BFA program in Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.

Mandy Harris Williams is a theorist, multimedia conceptual artist, writer, educator, radio host and internet/community academic. She is from New York City and currently lives in Los Angeles. Mandy’s work seeks to get everybody the love that they deserve. She focuses on desirability privilege as a real and mythological market and political force. She graduated from Harvard, having studied the History of the African Diaspora, as well as the mass incarceration crisis, and other contemporary black issues. She received her MA in Urban Education and worked as a classroom teacher for 7 years in low income communities. She integrates a holistic and didactic style into her current creative practice. Her creative work has been presented at Paula Cooper Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Art + Practice, Navel, Knockdown Center and Women’s Center for Creative Work to name a few. She has a monthly radio show, the #BrownUpYourFeed Radio Hour, on NTS. She has contributed writing work to Dazed Magazine, MEL magazine, ForHarriet, and The Grio and is a frequent radio and podcast guest.