BESPOKE: It’s April! The cruelest month? Make that the COOLEST month! Join us for the resurrection of our most garish garments and frighteningly fashionable attire as Tuesday April 23 the Bureau features Jericho Brown, Mariah MacCarthy, and Dima Mikhayel Matta at Bespoke, a bimonthly queer series where featured readers dress fun, fancy, or flirtatious. This sinfully sartorial series presents fashionable femmes, dapper dykes, chic twinks, trendy trans* folk, & frothy FTMs. Featured writers are encouraged to suit up or dress down: readers’ choice.
 
Open mic readers (2 minutes each): whose name shall be drawn from the rainbow top hat this month? General attendees: which incredible edibles from Dylan’s Candy Bar will find their way to the insatiate maws of our deviant demimonde?
 
Your Bespoke hosts are Christina Quintana “CQ” (writer/ playwright/ dyke about town), Tim Murphy (longtime LGBTQ journalist, activist and author of the novels Christodora and Correspondents) and Jerome Ellison Murphy (poet, critic and NYU Creative Writing Program administrator). This twinkling trio invites you to turn out in your Tuesday best (dressing up is welcome & encouraged, not mandatory) every other month for drinks and chat before & after our reading.
 
Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.
 
 
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019). His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
 
 
Mariah MacCarthy is a nonbinary creatrix and an award-winning writer, performer, and birth mother. They’ve written for BuzzFeed, Yes! magazine, LOOK magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. Their plays have been performed all over the world, and the New York Times called their immersive party play Mrs. Mayfield’s Fifth-Grade Class of ’93 20-Year Reunion “a lot of fun.” They live in Astoria with their cat, Sophie. Squad is their first novel.
 
 
Dima Mikhayel Matta is a Beirut-based university instructor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Balamand, a writer, and an actress. She received a Fulbright scholarship and completed her MFA in creative writing at Rutgers University in 2013. She has been acting for the stage since 2006 and has worked with directors such as Lina Abyad, Sahar Assaf, and Aliyah Khalidi. In 2014, she founded Cliffhangers, the first bilingual storytelling platform in Lebanon, and hosts monthly storytelling events along with parallel events such as storytelling workshops and performances. Cliffhangers is a non-profit initiative that aims to give a platform for marginalized voices and serves as a safe space for people to share their stories. In May 2018, she curated the first LGBTQ+ art exhibition in Lebanon, titled “Love Letters to Meem”. She is currently working on her first play that is scheduled to premiere in Beirut in Fall 2019.