December 6 - 14
First Friday, December 6, 6-10pm
VAE welcomes you to celebrate the wealth of literary talent in our community during the month of December! We are highlighting the diversity of authors, poets, and spoken word artists in our community. Our main gallery will be exhibiting writing on the walls as it has been transformed into a work space filled with interactive writing opportunities, a reading library, and book drop location for Book Harvest. The space will host a suite of poetry and author readings, book signings, and open mic events over the over the next two weeks.
SCHEDULE
December 6-14 - Book donation drop for Book Harvest
December 6th, 6-10 PM - First Friday Art Walk
December 8th, 7-10 PM - Tongue & Groove Open Mic
December 9th, 6-8 PM - Liberation's Station Presents: Justin Minott for an author reading
December 10th, 6-8 PM - Liberation's Station Presents: Tyrus Hinton for an author reading
December 11th, 6-8 PM - Liberation's Station Presents: Peaches Dean for an author reading
December 12th, 10-11 AM - Liberation's Station Presents: storytime with award-winning author Kelly Starling Lyons
December 13th, 6-8 PM - Liberation's Station Presents: Audrey Muhammad for an author reading
December 14th, 1-3 PM - Liberation's Station Presents: Avivia Brown for an author reading
PARTNERS + AUTHORS
Want to help us create more access to reading material for kids? Great! During The Writing on the Wall VAE is a donation drop location for Book Harvest, a Durham-based nonprofit that has put over a million books in the hands of children who might not otherwise have access to literature. VAE first connected with Book Harvest by funding their Wash & Learn project which places pop-up community libraries inside laundromats across Durham. We encourage you to donate new or gently used children’s books, appropriate for birth to high school-age kids. Books can be dropped off to VAE, Book Harvest in Durham, or purchase books off of their Amazon Wishlist and have them sent directly to their office!
Liberation's Station
The Reserved Seating Residency
Liberation Stations is hosting local authors of color to facilitate book readings and signings. The event is entitled The Reserved Seating Residency because the goal is to make room to create a seat at the table. Each author will read from a selection of their work, will be available to answer questions, sign books, and will make their books available for purchase. Each author will keep 100% of the proceeds from their sale.
Alison Coleman: The Lemonade Stand Project
The Lemonade Stand Project seeks to activate non-traditional spaces with art and community dialogue. It is a mobile art-making, storytelling, recipe gathering receptacle in the guise of a traditional lemonade stand. The goal is to encourage people to share their stories, favorite family recipes and make some art. The end result of a year’s worth of story, art, and recipe collection will be a potluck and book. For The Writing on the Wall, Allison has strung a clothesline up in the main gallery where you can pin your stories, recipes, or artwork.
Kristi Stout: Love Pamphlets
For the past couple years, Kristi Stout has been collecting religious pamphlets - from people in the NYC subway, from southern gas stations in the middle of nowhere, etc. They initially intrigued her with their intense language and their fairly nondescript design. Recently, she has been creating erasure poems out of my religious pamphlet collection. In case you're not familiar, the following is the Wikipedia definition of an erasure poem: "a form of found poetry...created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem." Kristi’s goal is to turn the alarmist and inflammatory writing found in these religious pamphlets ("you will burn in the fiery depths of hell, heathen!") into love poetry. Kristi’s work is on display in the gallery and she will host an interactive erasure poetry table during First Friday on December 6, 6-10 PM.
litSPARK: Exquisite Corpse Machine
The team behind litSPARK invites you to join them in breaking the World Record for longest Exquisite Corpse--a community-written poem. Exquisite Corpse is a collaborative poetry game that traces its roots to the Parisian Surrealist Movement. Traditionally, Exquisite Corpse is played by several people, each of whom writes a word on a sheet of paper, folds the paper to conceal it, and passes it on to the next player for their contribution.
For the past three years, thousands of people have contributed to their community-built poem much in the same way, but via a game console loaded with a Python-based program. Contributors can see only the previous line, then respond to it with a line of their own, and are then prompted to leave their email address if they would like to receive the final poem once the World Record is officially broken.
Tongue & Groove
Tongue & Groove is an open mic hosted and organized by Anna Weaver, Sarah Egan Warren, and Andrew Warren. Every second Sunday at VAE, Raleigh’s local talent gathers to co-create a night of ephemeral art—including poetry, music, storytelling, and the occasional interpretive dance.
T&G encourages artistic collaboration and sing-alongs. And each night the show closes with The Dovetail, a poem collectively written by the performers and audience alike.
Chris Vitiello
Chris Vitiello is a writer, performer, critic, and independent curator based in Durham, NC. You may also have met Chris as the Poetry Fox, where he will write anyone an on-demand poem. The only currency you must provide is one word.