How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?

Moustafa Bayoumi read from his new book: How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in American (Penguin 2008) at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts sponsored by ArteEast
Yasmin Dwedar joined the reading to share her story. Zohra Saed moderated the panel. Livia Alexander, Executive Director of ArteEast and Michelle Levy, Program Director of EFA Project Space coordinated the event.

The book has received fantastic reviews and its only been out a month! UpSet Press encourages you to read this book and share it with your friends. It is one of the most sensitively written books about the Arab American experience in Brooklyn. We love it so much, we teach it in our classrooms! And our students loved it enough to come out and show their support.

Here are some photos from the event:

Moustafa Bayoumi reading at the beautiful EFA Gallery

Zohra, Moustafa and Yasmin

Yasmin says "Its creepy how exact his description of my high school experience was in the book. It was as if he was sitting on my shoulder witnessing everything I went through at the time."

Post reading schmoozing:

Yasmin speaks to students from Hunter College who came out to support.

Moustafa and the line of admirers.

Notice the Constitutional Law book on the chair! Yasmin is in her first year of Law School, continuing to sharpen the skills she developed in High School fighting for her rights in New York's Public School system.

Livia Alexander, Executive Director/Co-Founder of ArteEast and friends. (Livia is in blue)

Here is a photo of some of the members who make up the stories in Moustafa Bayoumi's book.

(Photos by Zohra Saed)

Moustafa Bayoumi at the Park Slope branch of Barnes & Noble (August 20th Book Release Reading)

Rain Date: Video Poem by Cihan Kaan

Here is a lovely video poem in honor of rain in Brooklyn.


Rain Date Act II from Landbridge Massive on Vimeo.

Rain Date I

August Class Trip: Chanika Svetvilas at Brooklyn Public Library

In August, Zohra took her Asian Americans in the U.S. class to visit Chanika Svetvilas' Journeys exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library (Grand Army Plaza) on August 20th.

Chanika Svetvilas shares the interactive portions of her exhibit with the students.




Tara Bhattacharya-Moore takes notes in front of the suitcase that said My Side and then flipped to be Your Side


In the pockets of the suitcases Chanika had taken apart to sew onto the walls were notes that held visitors wishes and aspirations. Nia Taylor reads one wish out loud:



Hazem and Gigi listen to Chanika explain this piece The Grass is Greener on the Other Side


Exxon origami flowers...


Jean Singh poses with the Exxon flowers.


Class Photo: We are all in a suitcase, get it?


Thank you Chanika!

August UpSet Press Poetry Group Meeting

Denise Galang and Sean Ohanlon hosted the August 2008 Poetry Group Meeting at their beautiful home in Brooklyn. After a lovely Vegetarian BBQ, the group settled in for some indepth reading and critique of each other's work. We are lucky at UpSet to have this family atmosphere to nourish our poetry manuscripts. This group has been meeting for the past three years.

Poets: Jenny Husk, Sean O'Hanlon and Denise Galang

Poet: Nicholas Powers, author of Theater of War (UpSet Press 2006)

Poet: Robert Booras, Founding Editor of UpSet Press

Poet: Denise Galang checks up a word in the dictionary

Poets: Nicholas Powers and Jenny Husk look over a prose-poem

Bringing Who We Love into the Classroom!

Zohra Saed, editor at Up-Set Press, has been introducing her students to some lovely people.

Viamoana Niumeitolu of Mahina Movement visited her Asian American Literature and Postcolonial Literature courses at Hunter College in July 2008:


Moana wakes up the 10am class




Student Amani was so moved by Moana's talk and performance that she said she wished her friends in Kuwait could see Moana's performance


Moana talks about what makes her work postcolonial in the next class


Thank you Moana!

This visit was after the students had seen her one woman show: Tongue In Paint
(which was absolutely riveting)

The Second Life Premier of She's Got an Atomic Bomb directed by Cihan Kaan

(In this photo: She's Got an Atomic Bomb plays on the left side of this photo while Second Life members lounge in blue cushions enjoying the film. Photo courtesy of Cihan Kaan)

This ain't your momma's film screening!

The Blue Angel Poet's Dive located in Second Life, a virtual online community hosted the Premier of She's Got an Atomic Bomb (2005) directed by Cihan Kaan (aka Neon Clift) on August 27, 2008. Kaan is the author of a collection of short stories soon to be published by Up-Set Press. The film was released in 2007 as part of a DVD compilation exclusively available at Hot Topic stores: Twisted TV vol. 1 happily now its available on amazon.

Filmed in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn SGAB had a long underground run before being distributed on DVD. SL is the latest arena for the director to experiment with borderless and virtual film screening.

Synopsis:

A punk rock female enigma, infamous among members of the city for ruining their sewer system, attempts to build an A-Bomb with help from local Russian mafia and assorted decorated characters. Can she avoid the hi-jinx of two marauding Punks intent on stealing her secret? And even if they do will she inflict her personal justice upon the neighborhood?

SL audience members said:
The 1950's "aura" of it, the rock and roll, the explosion (or threat thereof), the "film noir" aspect, the femme fatale, the sassy takes-no-crap attitude... all very American touchstones made the film fun!

It's an interesting film culture which has made as much history by parodying itself as it has by actually being the thing it parodies.

Here is a link to a review of the film in The Indypendent:
"Drunk on Punk: She's Got an Atomic Bomb directed by Cihan Kaan"

Keep an eye out for this powerhouse writer/filmmaker!

Julie Agoos: Property

On Top of our Reading List:

Poet Julie Agoos (the inspiration for the poets who founded Up-Set Press) released her third collection of poetry Property (Ausable Press 2008):

Working within the frame of her native New England, Julie Agoos positions herself in her new book, Property, less as a first-person lyric speaker than as an acute listener to the layered history of small and large violences which ignite repeatedly in American life. Structured as a progression of poems which invoke the "genres" of oral history, gossip, legal transcript, and diary writing, Property arrives, in the long poem "Deposition," at the story of a particular, explosive, and horrific local crime.

Property's subject is historical and political: as she experiments from her unique lyric perspective with multiple ways of "telling"and explores through dramatic superimposition how the past inscribes and disturbs the present, Agoos interrogates our homegrown social and racial divides, and focuses emphatically on the ethics of living in a real and present world of ubiquitous war. Her images of natural beauty join a plain style derived from the rhythms of vernacular speech to challenge the complacenciesand consequences of her own American identity and belonging.

Born in Boston in 1956, Julie Agoos is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987) and Calendar Year (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). She taught for eight years as a lecturer in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and, since 1994, in the English department and MFA program in poetry at Brooklyn College/CUNY, where she is an associate professor. She lives in Nyack, New York.

Julie Agoos at the Academy of American Poet's book reading (April 23, 2008). Up-Set Press loves her glowing beautiful face!