Thursday Sept 7, 7:30-9:30pm
Free

A group of women draw educational posters to help their pupils navigate an opaque religious doctrine in a future, irradiated California. An anchoress’ words are turned over, reworked, erased, six hundred years after her death. The martyrdom of St. Agatha provides an entrance into an Object-Oriented Feminism. And the self is (kindly!) treated to expansion, displacement, failure.

Join us for an evening of readings by women working through, next to, and around the notions of the divine, the self, and the collective— and to celebrate the publication of a series of posters: The Sacred Categories: A Handbook for Organizing Religious Experience.

And some food and drink!

Alexandra Leon is a poet that stages her own and others’ writing through her body and sometimes makes videos and environments. Her work often deals with dissolution of subjectivities as a means to investigate diasporic identity, queer materialisms and voodoo histories. Her practice is macro-logically invested in the symbolic and material histories of institutional spaces, and their potential to be subverted. This line of thought extends itself via a continuing on-site engagement with a cluster of panopticon prisons on the Isla de Juventud, an island of an island off the southern coast of Cuba she has been working in since 2015. She puts forth material here and sometimes here.

Amy Katherine Cannon is a writer and writing teacher living in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Gerard Creative Writing Endowment. She is the author of the mini-chapbook ‘to make a desert’ (Platypus Press, 2016). Her work can be found in BOAAT, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Juked, and LIT, among other places. She is Managing Editor of Palaver Arts Magazine, a student publication.

Ana Cecilia Alvarez is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Patricia Sazani is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles. The Sacred Categories posters are part of an on-going, multi-year (multi-dimensional?) project that manages to absorb most of her interests: land use, sentences, pedagogy, dance, Lompoc, environmental disaster, and encounters with the divine that throw bodies against the edge of human experience.

The Sacred Categories: A Handbook for Organizing Religious Experience was drawn by Patricia Sazani while in residence at Wolfman Books, a gallery, press, artist residency, and bookstore, in Oakland, CA.