Writers on Writing: Andrea Abi-Karam and Anthony Discenza
Andrea Abi-Karam
Abi-Karam is a mixed-race genderqueer punk poet who writes on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma and delayed healing. They recently completed the manuscript EXTRATRANSMISSION, a book-length piece against how patriarchy and U.S. militarism produce the hyper-gendered subject. From 2012 to 2015 Abi-Karam and Drea Marina led Words of Resistance, a monthly radical queer open-floor poetry night aimed at creating space for folks to share their work, especially if unpolished and messy. Abi-Karam’s small-press project Mess Editions seeks to publish emerging writing from queers, people of color and those involved in social movements yet uninvolved in the poetry and art scenes.
Anthony Discenza
Since the late 1990s Discenza’s art has focused primarily on the omnipresence of mainstream media. In addition to his personal work, he devotes a great deal of time to HalfLifers, an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist Torsten Z. Burns. Discenza’s solo and collaborative work has been shown at numerous national and international venues, including the New York Video Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Impakt Festival, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2000 Whitney Biennial and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and the Video Databank of Chicago.
Writers on Writing
The Creative Writing Department opens its Writers on Writing course to the public this spring. Taught by Dodie Bellamy, the course features faculty and visiting writers reading from their works and discussing their creative process.