LINEAGE: Anne Carson, Wo Chan, Cathy Linh Che

LINEAGE is a quarterly event honoring the relationships that sustain artists. Poets’ concerns, processes, and creations intersect, inform, support and challenge each other. In this reading series, one selected reader invites a mentor and a mentee to read alongside them, illuminating this sometimes subtle, sometimes urgent, golden thread of artistic lineage.

The fifth LINEAGE reading features Anne Carson, Wo Chan, and Cathy Linh Che.

LINEAGE is organized by Emily Brandt and hosted by Wendy’s Subway.

Emily Brandt is the author of the forthcoming collection, Falsehood, and three chapbooks. She’s a co-founding editor of No, Dear and an Instructional Coach at a NYC public school.

Wendy’s Subway is a nonprofit library, writing space, and independent publisher located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Since 2013, Wendy’s Subway has provided a versatile platform for expanding modes of reading, writing, and publishing. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature with the belief that collaborative practice and equitable access to reading are catalysts for social transformation. More information at www.wendyssubway.com

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a storyteller whose interdisciplinary art comes to life through their love of high-camp ballads, meticulous vintage costuming, and DIY lyric supertitles. Wo’s poetry and performance evoke an operatic sense of play that brings together the high emotions of childhood, queer identity, memory, (un)documentation, and migration. Their chaplet ORDER THE WORLD, MOM was published by Belladonna* in 2016. Wo’s poems also appear in Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and are anthologized in Vinegar & Char (University of Georgia Press), Go Home! (Feminist Press), and Bettering American Poetry (Bettering Books). As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. They are a regular guest on Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns and have performed in operas, music videos, cabarets, and short films. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York where they teach poetry workshops and perform drag shows for queer and POC communities. They hold an MFA in Poetry from NYU.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She has received awards from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Anderson Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Poets House, Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman and lives in Brooklyn.

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.