ADULT CONTEMPORARY is an experimental non/fiction salon series featuring readings, lectures, performances and interviews with and by established and emerging writers. We seek out first person perspectives characterized by the urgent and the everyday; true stories that connect us to the big by way of the small, uneventful, and unexpected. Readings will be followed by informal conversations.

Organized by Katherine Brewer Ball and Svetlana Kitto.

Jan Clausen’s books include novels, the memoir Apples and Oranges, and six volumes of poetry. Her most recent poetry title, Veiled Spill: A Sequence, has just been published by GenPop Books. Individual poems have appeared widely in periodicals such as AGNI, Bloom, Drunken Boat, esque, Fence, Hanging Loose, The Hat, Hotel Amerika, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century and Poems from the Women’s Movement. In 1976, Clausen co-founded Conditions magazine, and later extended her involvement with the feminist small press movement as publisher of Long Haul Press. The recipient of writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and NYFA, she teaches in the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program and at NYU.

Jaime Shearn Coan is a poet and a PhD student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. You can find his writings on dance in the Brooklyn Rail. Jaime has received fellowships from Poets House, VCCA, Tin House, and the Saltonstall Foundation. He is the recipient of a 2014 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant and his chapbook, Turn it Over, will be published by Argos Books in 2015.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Assistant Professor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St Louis. Her research includes the history of science, critical race studies, and queer and feminist theory.  Her book, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism was just published by NYU Press. It uses masochism to probe the sensations that come with marginalization and powerlessness. She has also published articles on sexuality and embodiment in Feminist Review, Social Text, Literature and Medicine, theory and event, differences, and WSQ.