BELLADONNA* LESBIAN ALLSTARS
SWITCHBOARD EDITION
 
with Ariel Goldberg, Andriniki Mattis, Natalie Peart, LJ Roberts, Jeanne Thornton, and Jeanne Vaccaro
 

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Join us at the Bureau for the second installment of Belladonna* Lesbian Allstars, an intergenerational lesbian poetry reading. The reading will take place in the midst of Y’all Better Quiet Down, a group exhibition of art and ephemera in response to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. The exhibition is curated by Nelson Santos and Jeanne Vaccaro
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Ariel Goldberg is the author, most recently, of The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016).

Andriniki Mattis is a non-binary poet, who has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Poets House and The Poetry Project. They earned an M.A in Creative Writing and Education, from Goldsmiths University of London, and a B.A in Political and Poetic Resistance, from Brooklyn College. Their work has appeared in Wasafiri, Nepantla, The Felt and elsewhere. Andriniki is from and currently living in Brooklyn.

Natalie Peart brujas all day and writes fiction at Time’s witchiest hour. In addition to reading her work, she can read your cards and your charts. She also hosts the podcast Our Allowance, which centers the stories of Black and Brown people and our relationship to money. Her chaplet, Sixty-One, is published by Belladonna*.

LJ Roberts is an artist working in installation, textiles, collage, and text. Their work addresses queer and trans politics, material deviance, alternative kinship structures, archives, and narrative. LJ’s work has been shown in exhibitions at The Victoria and Albert Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The 8th Floor, Museum of Arts and Design, Vox Populi, Smack Mellon, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The Powerhouse Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The Oakland Museum of California, The DePaul Art Museum, The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at The University of Southern California, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art where their work is in the permanent collection. LJ has been the past recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and residencies at IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden–Stockholm), Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, The Textile Arts Center, and The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are a 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
In 2015, LJ was one of nine recipients of The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI artists. They also received the 2019 President’s Award for Art and Activism from the Women’s Caucus for Art. LJ’s first major museum commission is currently on view in Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall at the Brooklyn Museum. LJ lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald, as well as one of the editors (with Tara Avery) of We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, all three Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is one of the publishers of Instar Books and the creator of the webcomics The Man Who Hates Fun and Bad Mother. She lives in Brooklyn. More information is available at https://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne.