As the global pandemic persists, we become further estranged from touch. Not only is this estrangement a product of our circumstances, the distance between bodies is integral to the extension of our lives. As we envision a future beyond the pandemic, we are also redefining our relationship to touch, the intimate interaction between bodies, our sociality, our sense of the erotic, and our individual and collective vulnerabilities against the violent mechanisms of late capitalism. If we accept that touch has always possessed radical potential prior to the pandemic, how can we imagine other possibilities of touch in our pandemic present and future?

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” this reading and celebration of Muriel Leung’s IMAGINE US, THE SWARM draws from Lorde’s idea of the “erotic charge.” This political reimagining of touch hopes to transform the way we move and heal during a time of grief and uncertainty.

Purchase Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, the Swarm from the Bureau on or before June 23, 2021, and receive 25% off!

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Suggested donation $5 to benefit the Bureau.

All are welcome to join, with or without a donation.

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This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Readers biographies:

MURIEL LEUNG is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. An Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Fellow, she is completing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.

JOEY DE JESUS is the author of HOAX (The Operating System, 2021), We Animate the Dream: A Poet’s Run for Public Office (Mount Analog Political Pamphlet Series II, 2021), NOCT- The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019), and co-author, alongside Sade LaNay, of Writing Voice into the Archive vol. 1, edited by Jennifer Tamayo with support from UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender. Joey received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a Departmental Fellowship to complete their MA in Performance Studies from New York University. They received the 2019-20 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission and 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry for HOAX. Poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, Artists Space, Barrow Street, Bettering American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, The New Museum and elsewhere. Joey is a co-editor at Apogee Journal and sits on the advisory board of No, Dear Magazine. Joey lives in Ridgewood where they ran for New York State Assembly.

SARETTA MORGAN is a writer and artist based between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, Arizona. She is author of the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (2018) and room for a counter interior (2017). Her current creative work engages Black migration and ecology in the United States Southwest. As a community organizer she works at intersections of migrant justice, environmental justice, and Black liberation.

CHRISTINA OLIVARES is the author of the books of poetry No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, and Ungovernable, forthcoming from YesYes Books.

Olivares is a queer American-Cuban from the Bronx. She believes in the abolition of poverty and of the carceral state and in the radical project of imagining our liberation. She works as an educator.

CATALINA OUYANG engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, time-based projects, and relational works to examine themes of desire, subjugation, and dissidence. Ouyang’s practice is an act of searching: through myth, through literature, and through histories both oral and visual, to indicate counternarratives around representation and self-definition. Ouyang’s intuitive use of organic, inorganic, and conceptual material is simultaneously poetic, apocalyptic, primordial, and abject.

Ouyang will have a solo exhibition at No Place Gallery (Columbus, Ohio) in July 2021, followed by their second solo exhibition with Lyles & King in September. Additional solo exhibitions include Real Art Ways, Hartford, US; Knockdown Center, Queens, US; Make Room, Los Angeles, US; and Rubber Factory, New York, US. Ouyang’s work has been included in group exhibitions at SculptureCenter, Queens, US (curated by Katherine Simóne Reynolds); Nicodim, Los Angeles, US; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US (curated by Kelly Akashi); BRIC, Brooklyn, US; Helena Anrather, New York, US, and many more. Ouyang is currently a 2020-21 Studio Artist in Residence at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, US. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University in 2019. They are represented by Lyles & King, New York, and Make Room, Los Angeles.

ICA SADAGAT is a poet and essayist immersed in textual impact, pleasure/play, and question marks. She’s published in Apogee Journal, Nightboat Books, and TAYO Literary Magazine.

Currently, Ica is a Truman Capote Fellow and MFA candidate at CalArts where they co-created the HYPERLINK reading series in the Creative Writing Program. Ica received her BA at The New School studying Literature, Psychology, Race & Ethnicity, and Gender Studies. A former youth counselor, they’ve performed and/or instructed at The Philippine Center, The New School, Studio Museum 127, Princeton University, Brooklyn Museum, and more. Before and beyond that, Ica surfs.