This event is a 13th anniversary celebration for Louffa Press and open forum on the epidemic of book-banning, and is hosted by Louffa Press  on Sunday, December 3, at 3pm at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.

Participants* include:

BEATRIZ ALBUQUERQUE, ROBERT ANTHONY GIBBONS, JEE LEONG KOH, MATTHEW LANSBURGH, PACO MARQUEZ, CLAUDIA SEREA, TRIPHOBIA

Curated by DAVID MOSCOVICH 

After the readings, we will have a dialogue with the audience centered on the current trend of book-banning, particularly the banning of books by LGBTQ or POC authors; the reason is that 41% of content being banned or challenged is LGBTQ, and 40% of the books have protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.

We need these your voice to help stop this.

(The source on these statistics and be found at the following link from PEN America: https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/)

*Author books will be available at the event.

This event is made possible in part through funding by Poets & Writers.

LOUFFA PRESS was founded in 2010. Based in Morningside/Harlem, New York City, LOUFFA PRESS is a micropress that focuses on printing limited edition chapbooks using letterpress technology.

THE MISSION behind Louffa Press is to foster a venue for limited edition, collectible, handmade chapbooks and art books by a wide array of authors and artists whose voices must be heard; to introduce new and innovative flash fiction, short stories, poetry, and those forms less easily classified; to put forth into the world precious artifacts that embody in their physical form a meticulously tailored and individualist aesthetic. www.louffapress.net

Beatriz Albuquerque has received numerous awards including the Breakthrough Award for the 17th Biennial Cerveira; Myers Art Prize Award from Columbia University, New York; and the Ambient Performance Series Award, PAC / edge Performance Festival, Chicago. Her written work has been published in Performatus, ArtCapital Magazine, Cerveira Nova Journal, Studies in Digital Heritage Journal, among others. She has been anthologized in several books, such as Internet y Performance, Negociaciones entre Cuerpo, Virtualidad y Telepresencia (2011), Ediciones Al Margen, NIAM Publications; The Growth of Art Anthology (2015) Columbia University Press; Art School Critique 2.0 (2017) Columbia University Press; Performances no Contemporaneo (2019), FLUP Press; O Lado oculto da investigação (2023) ESE Press and RoadWork, which is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She is the author of four books of research and non-fiction: Art + Internet + Performance = beginning of the 90s, Video Games + Glitch = Learning: Video Games Vs. Teachers, Super Mario World + Glitch = Adult Learning and Game Glitch + Learning = Aesthetics. Design. Preservation. (www.beatrizalbuquerque.com)

Robert Anthony Gibbons has been nominated for a Pushcart for his poem, “a self taught genius” by Great Weather for Media. Robert has been published in hundreds of literary magazines and in several notable anthologies. Recent publication credits includes Killens Review, Tribes, Involuntary Magazine,Peregrine, Expound, Promethean, Turtle Island Quarterly, Killer Whale, and Suisun Valley Review, Voices of Lefferts and the Bronx Memoir Project: Vol. 2 published by the Bronx Council of the Arts. Robert’s first collection, Close to the Tree was published by Three Rooms Press, 2012, and his chapbook, Flight, published by Poets Wear Prada in 2019. His latest is a collaboration between Brooklyn-based artist Amy Williams, titled,  Some Little Words (2022). It is a collection of erasure and ekphrastic poems in tribute to Zora Neale Hurston.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the year by the Financial Times in the UK and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. His hybrid work of fiction Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. His latest book is Inspector Inspector from Carcanet.

Matthew Lansburgh’s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared (or is forthcoming) in journals such as One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and has been shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories series. He lives in Manhattan and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell.

Paco Márquez is a poet based out of Manhattan, author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Fence, The Literary Review, Apogee, Philosophy and Global Affairs and Huizache, among others. As Spanish Editor, he assisted in translating Pablo Neruda’s initial book, Crepuscualrio, for the first time into English as Book of Twilight with William O’Daly (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Originally from León, México, Paco immigrated with his family to Sacramento, California at age 13. He studied philosophy and literature at UC Berkeley and, after working for over a decade in varied fields, acquired an MFA in creative writing at NYU. His work has been supported by The Center for Book Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York University. Paco has served as poetry editor at Washington Square and OccuPoetry, and currently at 128 Lit. www.pacomarquez.net

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-American poet, translator, and editor with work published in Consequence, The Southern Review, Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Oxford Poetry, among others, as well as featured on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023). Serea won a Pushcart Prize, the Joanne Scott Kennedy Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and the New Letters Readers Award for her poems. She is a founding editor of National Translation Month, serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets, and co-hosts their monthly readings.

Esther Marveta Neff is the founder of PPL. They are a performance-maker, organizer, librettist, and theorist. Publications include operating manual Embarrassed of the (W)Hole (Ugly Duckling Press, 2023) Institution is a Verb (Edited, The Operating System, 2022), Any Size Mirror is a Dictator (BAC/BIPAF, 2015) and many zines. Book chapters have been included in the Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (with Yelena Gluzman), The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminist Performance Art, In the Wake (LiveArt UK), and various of forms of writing have appeared in PAJ, Paradigm, CAESURA, Ice-Hole, AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, CONTENT, and elsewhere. Neff is currently an adjunct at Hunter College and a member of the group Triphobia with 3dward g sharp and Noah Ortega. https://estherneff.wordpress.com/

David Moscovich is publisher of Louffa Press and author of You Are Make Very Important Bathtime (JEF Books, 2013) and LIFE+70[Redacted], a print version of the single most expensive literary e-book ever to be hacked (Lit Fest Press, 2016.) His novels Blink If You Love Me (2019) and his newest, Manhattan Other (2023), are available from Adelaide Books. www.louffapress.net