Face to Place, a Literary Salon, hosted by NYFA
Literary Programming for Current Exhibition
In conjunction with our current exhibition, Face to Place, NYFA is pleased to host its second Literary Salon on Wednesday, March 18, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM featuring Liuyu Chen, Marwa Helal, Cordula Maria Rien Kuntari, and Vivian Yang with a discussion moderated by Sarah Dohrmann.
Face to Place highlights select participants of NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program from its inaugural year in 2007 through 2014.
“The exhibit (Face to Place) features artwork that draws attention to the acute artistic observations that are often manifested through the immigrant artist experience and the unique perspectives cultivated through transitioning to, living, and creating in another country.” – Felicity Hogan, Senior Program Officer, NYFA Learning/Professional Development
Connected to the theme of the exhibition, the writers will be reading from work inspired by what it means to be an immigrant artist.
When: Wednesday, March 18, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
The readings and discussions of the work will begin at 7:10 PM. There will be time before and after the readings to network, socialize, and view the exhibition.
Where: New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) , 20 Jay Street, Suite 740, 7th Fl., Brooklyn, NY 11201
Readers:
Liuyu Chen
Marwa Helal
Cordula Maria Rien Kuntari
Vivian Yang
Discussions will be moderated by Sarah Dohrmann
This event is free and open to the public. Click here to RSVP.
Readers:
Liuyu Chen
Liuyu is a writer, poet, and translator living in New York. She received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Language and Culture University, and her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from New York University. Liuyu was chosen for the New York Foundation for the Arts Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists in 2014. Her poems have appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, among others. Liuyu is currently working on her first book, a nonfiction account about her upbringing in China, while developing her translation career.
Liuyu will be reading two poems, Nothing Falls on the Fisherman’s Dream, and Desert Well.
Marwa Helal
Marwa Helal is creative and editorial director of FENMagazine, an online publication dedicated to covering Arab-American art. Her work has appeared in the American Book Review, Business Today Egypt, CBS “Evening News” and “The Early Show”, Common Ground News Service, Egypt Today, Open City, and GULF Life magazines. She is a graduate of the New School’s Creative Writing MFA program, an alum of the VONA/Voices Workshop and the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program. Visit Marwa’s website and follow her on Twitter.
Marwa will be reading an excerpt from new work.
Cordula Maria Rien Kuntari
Cordula Maria Rien Kuntari is a freelance journalist and an independent writer who spent most of her career with Kompas Daily, the largest circulation newspaper in Indonesia. She was born and raised in Yogyakarta, a small city rich in cultural heritage in the southern Island of Java where she learned humanity, love, and friendship. Her cultural background has made her eyes open to the humanitarian issues in her reporting. She reported from more than 50 countries in Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. She covered the Gulf War (1991), Iraq Economic Embargo (1993), the Rwanda Genocide (1994), Cambodia (1996), First and Second Iraqi Referendum (1997 and 2002), and East Timor from 1992 up to its independence in 2002. Her book East Timor, The Final Hour: A Journalist’s Notes, resulted in her traveling to the US due to the controversy surrounding her truthful reporting. Currently she lives in NYC where continues writing her books on Iraq, Rwanda, and her trio to Gaza. Manhattan Cappuccino, a compilation of her journey, will be published soon.
Cordula Maria Rien Kuntari will be reading from Manhattan Cappuccino.
Vivian Yang
Vivian is a Publishers Weekly-profiled and WNYC Leonard Lopate Essay Contest-winning author and cultural commentator who bridges East and West through insightful analyses and compelling and entertaining stories set in Shanghai, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw. She is the author of the novels Memoirs of a Eurasian, Shanghai Girl and the nonfiction work Status, Society, and Sino-Singaporeans. Her fiction is narrated in the context of the 20th-century Chinese and Russian diasporas, and deals with a subject rarely seen in Western literature – that of the life experiences of Russian-Chinese in Shanghai before and under the communist regime. Vivian was on the teaching faculty of the School of Journalism and Communication and the School of English Studies of Shanghai International Studies University in her native Shanghai. She studied creative writing on merit scholarships at Columbia University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was a recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a Publishing Grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and was a Literary Mentor of The New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Program. Vivian’s writing has appeared in China Daily, Far Eastern Economic Review, HK Magazine, The National Law Journal, The New York Times, South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal Asia, among other international journalistic and literary journals, anthologies, and webzines. In 2014, Vivian was honored by the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum as “one of the Most Important English-Writing Chinese Authors” in the United States. Visit Vivian at her website.
Vivian will be reading a piece is entitled: Place, Memory, Future Tense.
Moderator and Host
Sarah Dohrmann
Sarah has been a Fulbright fellow (Morocco), a NYFA fellow in the category of nonfiction literature (2009), a two-time Jerome Foundation Travel and Study grantee and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace writer in residence. Sarah received the 2015 Sarah Verdone Writing Award and was co-recipient, with photographer Tiana Markova-Gold, of the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their joint project on women and prostitution in Morocco; their collaboration, which includes a long-form essay by Dohrmann and images by Markova-Gold, is forthcoming in Harper’s Magazine. Sarah’s essay about North African women living on the periphery of Paris is forthcoming in n+1 magazine. Sarah’s work has appeared in New York online, The Iowa Review, TIME LightBox, Some Call It Ballin’, LUMINA Journal, Joyland Magazine and Teachers & Writers Magazine, among others. Sarah serves on NYFA’s artist advisory committee representing nonfiction literature. She’s currently at work on a book of creative nonfiction called Point of Departure and is publishing an essay every Tuesday of 2015 on her blog, Today’s Tuesday and her website.
If you can’t make to the literary salon, please visit the exhibition, Face to Place, up through May 7. Gallery Hours are Monday to Friday 9:30 AM – 5:30 PM.
We look forward to seeing you at the event!
Questions: Email [email protected]
