Harmony Holiday & Lily Jue Sheng with Nyle Genevieve

Harmony Holiday

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of four collections of poetry, Negro League Baseball, Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues, Hollywood Forever, and A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. She founded and runs Afrosonics, an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics, and Mythscience, a publishing imprint that reissues and reprints works from the archive. She worked on the SOS, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka, transcribing all of his poetry recorded with jazz that has yet to be released in print and exists primarily on out-of-print records. Harmony studied Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a NYFA Fellowship. She is currently completing a book of poems called M a à f a and an accompanying collection of essays and memoir, Love is War for Miles, both to be released this fall, as well as a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

Lily Jue Sheng with Nyle Genevieve

Lily Jue Sheng works between moving image, collage, text, performance, and installation. Nyle Genevieve makes video art, comics, zines, music, and handmade apparel. They met in college at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and are both based in New York City. Nyle’s series ‘Winds of Change’ and ‘Never Sit’ merge anthropomorphic existential crisis and female desire with doing everything yourself. She also plays drums for Nandas. Lily’s video work ‘Five Movements (五種流行之氣)’ has expanded into select performances at The Knockdown Center (with Anjuli Rathod) and Roulette Intermedium (with Anjuli Rathod and Nyle Genevieve). ‘Five Movements’ uses cinema to describe feelings of melancholia – the sensations of dreaming, and disrupting, myths surrounding the home. The third performance at The Poetry Project will include an expanded spoken word and unique subtitles in Shanghai dialect and English by Lily and a performed music score by Nyle.