July 15th Reading: Elliott! Haynes! Heredia!
Swapping places with the local veggies for our July reading at Farm to People in Bushwick (also NYC folks don't forget to VOTE!)
Readers of Content,
Thanks to everyone who joined us last week at Ace Hotel Brooklyn for our reading with Torrey Peters, Denne Michele Norris, and Emma Copley Eisenberg! We had a postcoitally-inspired cheese and prosciutto plate for Denne’s When The Harvest Comes, a goat grease and spud lumberjack stew for Torrey’s Stag Dance, and thick cookie-studded DQ Blizzard dupes for Emma’s Housemates. It was a really lovely night of relief from the madness of the world around us, to gather with you all around good food and brilliant authors offering three beautiful visions of queer identity, love, and art-making. See some photos from the night here.
As we try to cool down indoors (and get outdoors to canvass and VOTE! More below on that) amidst this scorching city heat, we’re also looking forward to our July TOC reading! We’ll be returning to the lovely, airy, local produce oasis of Farm to People in Bushwick on July 15th to hear readings from Alejandro Heredia (LOCA), Julia Elliott (HELLIONS), and Justin Haynes (IBIS). Read more about our authors and grab tickets below.
Alejandro Heredia is a queer Afro-Dominican writer from The Bronx. LOCA is his debut novel. He has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, the Dominican Studies Institute, Kenyon Review, and Trinity College. Heredia’s work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Lambda Literary Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College and currently serves as Black Mountain Institute’s Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Justin Haynes is a novelist and short story writer who was born in Port of Spain and raised just outside of it. He holds degrees from St. Francis College, the University of Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded various fiction residencies and fellowships, including from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Carl Djerassi Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, the Vermont Studio Center, the Nicholas Jenkins Barnett fiction fellowship at Emory University, Art Omi, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and at the Tin House Summer Workshop.
Julia Elliott is the author of Hellions and the story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (both from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, Granta (online), and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.
Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink. Additional drinks will be available for purchase. Our friends Sammi and Olivia of Cocktails in Color will be mixing up cocktails inspired by our three authors' books, so you'll want to make room for a couple! And the good folks at Greenlight will be with us selling books, so come ready to pick up a few copies.
We do have a handful of seats reserved for sliding-scale admission to keep these events as financially accessible as possible. Please let us know if this ticket price is prohibitive for you and we’ll find a way to get you a seat at the table. These sliding scale seats are limited, so please be thoughtful about your resources and needs when making a request.
For more information on physical accessibility at Farm to People or any other questions, please write us at biscuits@tablesofcontents.org.
We can accommodate gluten-free and vegetarian diets with advance notice. If you have other restrictions or aversions you are of course still encouraged to attend, you just may not be able to partake in every course. Please be sure to notify us of any serious allergies in advance and remind us at the event.
Doors will open at 6:45 so feel free to come a few minutes early to grab a drink and get settled. See you all July 15th at the Farm to People!
TOC
For our NYC readers, a reminder that today is the day for in-person voting in the city’s Democratic primary for Mayor! No surprise that we are excited about the candidates that focus on the values we as an organization prioritize: accessibility, community-building and communal safety, access to good food, generosity, and excellent and inspiring storytelling. That leaves us with a lot of admiration and excitement for Zohran Mamdani who we would love to see be the next mayor of this city, and plenty left over to rank great candidates like Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Adrienne Adams, and others who have all shared aligned yet personalized visions for a better version of the city we spend so much time working to support and love being a part of. (Check out TOC Alum Sarah Thankam Mathews’ newsletter for more smart, sharp, and grounded reasoning towards a vote for Zohran.)
Our stores of admiration are exhausted when it comes to Andrew Cuomo. We can’t imagine supporting a candidate who doesn’t live in the city yet seeks to run it; has worked against accessibility in areas like affordability and public transit; has created aggressive and predatory work environments diametrically opposed to the kind and equitable spaces we both enjoy and strive to create; and clearly doesn’t share our interest in the beautiful nuances at the intersections of language and food (such as the basic shibboleth of breakfast sandwich ordering which even the newest NYer seems to easily acquire by their second trip to the bodega.) All of which means Cuomo will not be on our ballots and we encourage you to leave him off yours as well.
One more reminder that applications are open for our fall Regenerative Residency, now until July 1st! Find more information and apply at the link (it’s easy, we promise!) Don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions, and feel free to watch the recording from our recent Zoom chat with our past residents for insight into experience and especially all their glowing wonderful goodness!
-Evan & the TOC team
