“3 Generations Top” at the Lunar New Year: Artists Market at Vollmer Center at Cylburn Arboretum, 4915 Greenspring Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, through February 28.
The garment — with a pattern of repeating five-point stars in bright colors — on the wall of the Vollmer Center at the Cylburn Arboretum was transported by courier from Romania, where the multidisciplinary artist Irene Chan is finishing a Fulbright Fellowship. “3 Generations Top,” as Chan calls the work, is the most personal yet in her illustrious career, incorporating her own legacy while remaining inspired by international folktales.
“The project stands as a vibrant testament to our heritage, celebrating joy and resilience, and the unbreakable connection,” Chan said.
The garment fuses the intricate patterns of traditional Romanian folk costumes with the 100-families garment style of Qing Dynasty China. From each pocket, a fabric book unfolds, sprawling across the garment, tracing Chan’s lineage.
The books depict the lives of women from Chan’s maternal line, beginning with her grandmother’s orphaning, then her mother’s upbringing during World War II, and finally Chan’s own isolated childhood. Hand-embroidered symbols mark the books’ pages, chronicling the women’s shared experiences of enduring abuse and servitude before escaping and finding joy. A dumpling representing her grandmother’s wish for food while enslaved by her aunt and a stack of books representing Chan’s connection to the outside world after a childhood of forced servitude show the parallels and advancement in each woman’s story.
The exhibition at the Arboretum is a continuation of the artistic presence Chan has built in the city, including a previous showing at The Peale Museum in 2022. The former Baltimore resident maintains her ties to the city by serving as an affiliate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The latest exhibition sees Chan extending her family’s legacy of artistry and oral storytelling. (Nicole Belcastro)
HOT L Poets Clare Banks, Jan Beatty, Armen Davoudian, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, Bradley Paul, Alexis Sears, Chris Watkins, and David Yezzi at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, 10 E. Mount Vernon Place, March 6, 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
The HOT L Poets Series on Facebook
If you’ve never attended the AWP conference before, you may find yourself developing a desire to clone yourself and be in at least five places at once. The reason should be obvious: a whole slew of the offsite events are packed with writers who are truly that good. But we’d be remiss not to recommend a longtime production that brings star power to the table — and has earned a lot of love in its 8 years as an official reading series, with nearly 150 published poets taking part.
Hot L Poets’ Stephen Reichert can usually be found hosting local and regional heavy hitters alongside the best poetry open mic in town every second Sunday. (In addition to Hot L, which is seemingly named after the short-lived Norman Lear show “Hot l Baltimore,” Reichert’s magazine Smartish Pace has hosted events for over 25 years in the Baltimore area and beyond.) Normally tucked inside the idyllic, airy Bird In Hand bookstore/coffeeshop, Hot L has graduated to an iconic Baltimore venue in honor of AWP: the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church.
Bask in this historic setting while enjoying the poems of Guggenheim fellow Denise Duhamel. Listen to the interplay between English and Persian poetry with Armen Davoudian. Celebrate the forthcoming release of Chris Watkins’ collection, “The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus.” The beauty of Hot L is that there is always something for everyone to savor. (nat raum)
Neon Mic Night at Old Major, 900 S. Carey Street, Wednesday, March 4, 7:00 p.m.
With a slew of poets, novelists, and other ink-stained wretches descending on the city, we wanted to be sure to help them find one of our favorite literary bars, Old Major, named after one of the porcine characters in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” But, it turns out, the writers and publishers found the bar long before they even hit the streets of Baltimore, booking the bar with a bevy of bookish off-site AWP events, including Neon Mic Night, which TimeOut Chicago called one of the Windy City’s best literary and poetry events.
“With AWP, I wanted to capture the same energy we have in Chicago, but with more readers and a bit more rapid-fire of a setup,” host Ben Niespodziany explained via email. The readings will be broken into three one-hour sections, with each reader getting ten minutes, so you’ll have plenty of time to sample some of Old Major’s delicious food and have a few local Baltimore beers, while listening to a group of writers Niespodziany describes as blending “surrealism with absurdism, lightness with darkness, tenderness with slapstick.” (Baynard Woods)
Song/Book: Music and Fiction from People Who Write Both at Black Cherry Puppet Theater, 1115 Hollins Street, Friday March 6, 7 p.m.
Baltimore is a city of hustlers. Everybody’s got a side hustle or three, and this is especially true of our countless multidisciplinary artists/writers/musicians etc. In that spirit, Black Cherry Puppet Theater is hosting an event where folks who write music and fiction will perform both, in Black Cherry’s beautiful and eerie Sowebo theater. Devon Halliday, Sarah Pinsker, Owen Lyman-Schmidt, Gowan-Arnold, and JB Aris, a fave who sings with Moth Broth and writes charming and off-beat, queer, surrealist short stories, will perform. Plus, it’s free (though they will happily take your donations). And there’s great pizza up the block at Zella’s if you need to stuff your poem-hole either before or after the show. (Baynard Woods)
Mess and Friction with Leila Chatti, Aaron John Curtis, Asa Drake, Allegra Hyde, Eugenia Leigh, Sarah Perry, and Talin Tahajian at Fadensonnen (Upstairs Tavern), 3 W. 23rd Street, March 5, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
@messandfriction on Instagram
Picture yourself sitting at the bar in a dimly lit tavern roughly the size of your first Charles Village studio apartment. You sip a spirit-free bramble riff from a frosty tulip glass and angle your copy of Richard Siken’s “Crush” towards the candle in front of you. The din is calming, blurred faces shifting in and out of your peripheral vision like your eyes were a camera lens left open. Soon, there is not a free seat left in the house.
Chatter continues; familiar faces find each other in the crowd, hug hello. Every high-profile reading you’ve been to before was stuffy, but all of these guests are friends of sorts, even if only in a Smalltimore sense — he knows her, she knows them, they know your cousin, et cetera.
A gentle voice begins to speak and a hush grips the tavern. Under the incandescent spotlight of an overhead lamp above the wood podium, it begins. The rest is Mess and Friction, in a special AWP edition, and its precise blend of voice-driven work read aloud in an intimate setting can only ever be described as mesmerizing, intoxicating. (nat raum)
Haymarket Books Presents: Poetry for Changing the World atRed Emma’s, 3128 Greenmount Avenue
Red Emma’s, our favorite worker-owned radical book store, has a lot going on for AWP, including a panel on the importance of cringe (Wednesday, March 4), a collection of writers addressing the genocide in Sudan (also March 4), an indie translation hour (Thursday March 5), and a Greywolf Press tribue to the late great California poet Larry Levis. But the thing we’re most excited about is Poetry for Changing the World, presented by Haymarket Books, who have been publishing some of the most essential volumes for thinking through our calamitous world and hosting essential online discussions with writers such as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Rebecca Solnit that have helped many of us navigate these tumultuous years.
So it will be a joy to join the press with poets such as Golden, Maya Salameh, Daniella Toosie-Watson, and Corney Lamar Charleston, who can electrify the page with verses like:
My mind is spinning blanks inside every
chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys
like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that
happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me
or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday
stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all
the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love:
Squeeze. (Baynard Woods)
Atomic Books: The Wayward Writer Literary Extravaganza! at Eightbar @ Atomic Books 3620 Falls Road
Atomic Books and the adjoining Eightbar, where the stick is decorated with pages from Daniel Clowes’ “Eightball” comics, have long touted themselves as featuring “literary finds for mutated minds” and will surely be a hot-spot for AWP, featuring a happy hour for McSweeney’s Books (Wednesday, March 4), a mix of reading and karaoke (Friday, March 6), and an extravaganza for the DIY self-publishers, including Baltimore’s China Martens, author of the recent novel “The Avenue,” long-time zine publisher, and editor of PM Press’ “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways To Support Families In Social Justice Movements & Communities” and “Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines” (Saturday, March 7).
With so many presses, publishers, university departments, and gatekeepers, it’s important to remember the DIY crowd — often it’s not that they can’t find a publisher, it’s, in the best punk spirit, that they don’t fucking want to. (Baynard Woods)