Join us for a reading and discussion on the theme of grief, representation, and the body, on Saturday, March 31, 2018, from 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., at Beyond Baroque, 681 North Venice Boulevard, in Los Angeles, California.
Madelyn Garner reads from Hum of Our Blood, her profoundly moving meditation on the loss of her son, the talented photographer and artist Bradley Braverman, from AIDS. She's joined in reading by poet, visual culture scholar, and The Chronicles author Ramón García. Following the reading, poet Karen Kevorkian moderates a discussion that covers the legacy of the AIDS epidemic, representations of the body in poetry and photography, and poetry’s role in coping with illness and loss. This program is offered in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition's national programming on the theme of Poetry & the Body. Co-sponsored by Lambda Literary.
About the Artists
Master teacher, editor, and poet, Madelyn Garner has degrees from the University of Denver and Mills College. As a creative writing instructor, middle school principal, and mentor, she is widely recognized for designing and implementing a variety of innovative educational programs at all levels, elementary through university. Among her educational achievements and honors, she is the recipient of the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities for encouraging incorporation of the arts into school programs. Named a Leo Love Merit Scholar at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, Madelyn also was awarded an Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Annual Writing Retreat scholarship. In 2010, she won the Jackson Hole Writers Conference Poetry Prize. As co-editor, she edited and published the anthology, Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined, in 2011. Recent work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2015, The Florida Review, The Pinch, Slant, Roanoke Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Water-Stone Review, among others. Her debut book was selected for publication by TupeloPress/3: A Taos Press in the July Open.
Ramón García is the author of two books of poetry The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010), and a scholarly book-length monograph on the photographer Ricardo Valverde entitled Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). The Chronicles was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, in the category of Poetry Book in English. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of US-Hispanic Literature, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He teaches at California State University, Northridge and lives in downtown Los Angeles.
Bradley Braverman, known in L.A art circles as Bad Brad, was an artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, and photographer based in Los Angeles. His commercial work was recognized by the 1992 Nikon Award for Excellence, while his highly stylized black and white films won the Adult Video News Awards in 1992, the porn industry’s equivalent to the Oscars. At the time, critics said his work had made “an aesthetic leap forward” in erotic filmmaking, and had “elevated the genre to the art-house level, earning comparisons to the work of Andy Warhol, Bruce Webber and Robert Mapplethorpe.” His last art show at Grand Arts, Kansas City, Kansas, fall of 1995, just before Braverman’s death of AIDS, featured fourteen black and white photographs titled “Auto-erotic Suicide Suite”. The photographs were shot over a two-year period during which he asked HIV-positive friends and models to visualize an alternative ending to their impending suffering. The art installation, already shown nationally, reflected Braverman’s desire to humanize AIDS and homosexuality.
The Poetry Coalition, of which Beyond Baroque is a founding member, will present national programming throughout March 2018 on the theme of Poetry and the Body.
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