Join us online and in-person on Sunday, August 6 for the launch of Invitation to Form: Epic Mix, edited by Julianne Neely! We'll hear readings from six of the anthology's contributors: Aaron Lelito, Caroline Rayner, and Julianne Neely will perform IRL; and Marisa Tornello, Rebecca Teich, and S. Erin Batiste will read virtually. We're also planning a free, generative, and epic micro-workshop for guests during intermission!
Gist:
Sunday, August 6, 2023; 3pm ET
IRL at Fitz Books & Waffles in Buffalo (433 Ellicott St.); virtual via Zoom
Presented by Peach Mag; hosted by Julianne Neely
Readings by Aaron Lelito, Caroline Rayner, Julianne Neely, Marisa Tornello, Rebecca Teich, and S. Erin Batiste
IRL: free and open to the public
Virtual: advance registration required
Peach Mixes are partly funded by a DEC/SCR grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, administered locally by Arts Services Inc. Mixes are also produced in partnership with Just Buffalo Literary Center.
About Invitation to Form: Epic Mix
Julianne Neely's Invitation to Form: Epic Mix is the fourth installment of our anthology series, Peach Mixes! In Mixes, we invite previous Peach contributors to edit themed pocketbook-length anthologies from a mix of the hundreds of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art features we've published in our online journal since 2016.
Invitation to Form republishes work by Peach contributors Julianne Neely, Aaron Lelito, Ava September Hofmann, Caroline Rayner, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Marie Buck, Matthew Walker, Marisa Tornello, Rebecca Teich, S. Erin Batiste, and Victoria Saeli.
"The epic is amenable to differing aesthetic and political projects. It is a grab bag of forms, an open one that can handle the vastness of collective experience," Julianne writes in an editor's note on "epic" work that introduces the anthology.
About the Readers
Aaron Lelito is a visual artist and writer from Buffalo, New York. In his photographic work, he is primarily drawn to the patterns and imagery of nature. His images have been published as cover art in Red Rock Review, Peatsmoke Journal, and The Scriblerus. His work has also appeared in Barzakh Magazine, Novus Literary Arts Journal, Inklette Magazine, EcoTheo Review, and SPECTRA Poets. He is editor in chief of the art and literature website Wild Roof Journal.
Caroline Rayner is a writer and teacher from Virginia. She is the author of The Moan Wilds (Shabby Doll House, 2023).
Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD student and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review, and more. She has three chapbooks out with Slope Editions, garden-door Press, and Foundlings Press.
Marisa Tornello is a composer, vocalist, performance and video artist, and poet. From bodypaint and graphic scores to user interface video art, Tornello cultivates a platform for dialogue around the human psyche through the dual lens of trauma and healing. They were a recipient of the Jerome Foundation Artist Commission Award at Roulette Intermedium in 2022, and received the 2023 DCLA Premier Grant for their upcoming piece, “When I.” Their works have been shown at Roulette, the Tank, Jack, La MaMa ETC, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Vital Joint, Invisible Dog Arts Center, and Judson Church, and have been featured in the Exponential Festival and Ladyfest at the Tank. Tornello is from and based in Staten Island.
Rebecca Teich is a writer, curator, and PhD student based in New York. Currently the co-curator of Desperate Living Reading Series with Ry Dunn, she curated the Fall 2018 and 2019 Segue Reading Series, and was Artists Space’s teaching-poet-in-residence from 2019 to 2021. Teich’s writing has been featured in The Tiny, No, Dear Magazine, poets.org, Resonance (Nightboat Books), The Poetry Project Newsletter, Baest Journal, and elsewhere. Teich’s first chapbook, Caffeine Chronicles (2021), was published by Portable Press @ YoYo Labs.
S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2022-2023 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow with The Poetry Project and has received fellowships and support from Cave Canem, PEN America, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation, among other honors. Author of the chapbook Glory to All Fleeting Things, her work has exhibited in New York and has appeared and been anthologized internationally in Interim, Michigan Quarterly Review, wildness, You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, and forthcoming in In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy.
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