Tables of Contents March: A Reading and a Residency!
Chelsea Market on March 18th and our Hudson Valley Residency returns (with a special dinner March 29th!)
Readers of Content,
Thanks to everyone who joined us to kick off our 2024 series with our reading at Insa last Monday. We had an amazing time with Temim Fruchter, Cynthia Zarin, and Megan Nolan, cooking up a folkloric potato dish, a comforting San Marzano stew, and mugs of rich hot chocolate. If you missed it, you can catch photos from the event on our IG.
Looking ahead, we’re thrilled to have a heavy-budded branch of March events to share with you! First up, our reading series returns to Chelsea Market on March 18th, featuring Rita Bullwinkel (Headshot), Soraya Palmer (The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts), and Emmeline Clein (Dead Weight).
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot and Belly Up, which garnered a 2022 Whiting Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in ZYZZYVA, Tin House, The White Review, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, Noon, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from Macdowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Dutch, and Greek. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart prizes. She is an editor at large for McSweeney’s, the deputy editor of The Believer, a contributing editor for Noon, and the creator of Oral Florist. She is an assistant professor of English at University of San Francisco where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.
Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts. She is a Flatbush-born-and-raised writer and licensed social worker. Her novel was named one of Today's “38 Best New Books to Read in 2023,” one of the “Buzziest Debut Novels of the New Year” by Goodreads, one of the “Best and Most Anticipated Books of 2023” by Elle magazine, and one of “The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2023” by Ms. Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Hazlitt, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center and graduated from the Virginia Tech MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.
Emmeline Clein is a writer. Her first book, Dead Weight, is forthcoming from Knopf this month! It is forthcoming from Picador in the United Kingdom. Her chapbook, Toxic, was published by Choo Choo Press in 2022.
Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink (beer, wine, or NA). We can’t sell drinks on-site at Chelsea Market, so if you want to make space for a second drink (or a third!) be sure to add them to your ticket order. Chelsea Market’s own Posman Books will be with us selling copies of each book, so come ready to buy!
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.
2024 Residency Dinner!
Our other big announcement for March is we’re hosting our second season of the TOC Regenerative Residency at Glynwood, a non-profit organization in Cold Spring, NY serving food and farming changemakers from New York’s Hudson Valley and beyond. We hosted Giada Scodellaro as our inaugural resident last year, and this year we’re thrilled to host two writers, Diane Cook and Andriniki Mattis, for 3-week residencies on Glynwood’s stunning farm.
As part of the residency we are hosting a closing dinner at Glynwood on Friday, March 29th! The meal will include drinks, snacks, and multi-course literary meal inspired by Diane and Andriniki’s work, as well as a conversation among the authors and Evan to close out the night.
Glynwood is truly one of the most magical places we have ever been, and we feel so lucky to share it with our residents and for this night with the TOC community. Tickets are pricier than our regular events, but we promise it will be worth it! This dinner is also our primary fundraiser for the residency, and we deeply appreciate your support as we continue grow this program into a fertile incubator for literary and artistic talent.
If you’re up for something extra special, we’re also able to offer a handful of overnight stays after the dinner. Imagine taking the train up to Cold Spring Friday for the dinner, spending the night in the stunning Perkins House, and having breakfast and a little farm tour with us on Saturday morning before either heading back to the city or just carrying on with your own cusp-of-spring Hudson Valley weekend!
Here are some photos from last year’s dinner to give you a sense of the splendor of the night. Please reach out with any questions we can help answer, and read more about our residents below. We hope to share this special evening with plenty of familiar faces!
Diane Cook is the author of the novel The New Wilderness, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection Man V. Nature, a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. She is a former producer for the radio show This American Life. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.
andriniki mattis was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, Poets House, and The Poetry Project. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths University of London and a B.A. in Political and Poetic Resistance from Brooklyn College. His poems have appeared in wildness, Indiana Review, Wasafiri, Montez Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of Quiet Fires (Anamot Press 2023).
Thanks also to Beck Projekt for our residency poster design!
On Our Shelves
what we’re reading, eating, and looking forward to
Our music buddies at Switch Hit Records are celebrating their first year in business with a birthday party at Little Egg TOMORROW Saturday February 17th, featuring music, mezcal negronis, and some very special meatballs. Some of y’all know Switch Hit co-founders Rachel and Lora-Faye from TOC events & we’d love to celebrate and support them with y’all!
BEM Books & More is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund their brick and mortar home for Black food writing in Brooklyn! Their shop will be a home for Black food literature of all kinds, readings, community gatherings, and even have a test kitchen and events space (that we can’t wait to collaborate in!) If you can, please help support their work and spread the word to other food and book lovers!
For the second year we’re getting involved in curating some nonfiction food writing panels for the Brooklyn Book Festival’s main festival day in September. If you know of any cookbooks or other nonfiction food writing collections coming out this year that you’re especially ravenous for, send us a recommendation!
Love that y’all shouted out BEM books! Love them