Choose Your Own Adventure! A Live Magazine Launch Party
Lace up your boots and dig out your treasure map, we're publishing a magazine together!
CURA Magazine is about to launch its next issue and to celebrate our continuing partnership with The Doe Fund we invite you to a night of adventuring and revelry.
Participate in a live prompt for our Action gallery and watch the new issue of CURA come together in real time before your very eyes with your writing, your photos. Your adventure. We promise provisions (of course).
Tuesday, April 23
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Wix Lounge
10 W. 18th Street
New York, NY
Tickets at $15 in advance, $20 at the door and all proceeds go directly to The Doe Fund, our non-profit partner. Please note that we are only accepting credit/debit card payment.
CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action is a multi-media initiative based at Fordham University committed to integrating the arts and social justice.
CURA sits at the intersection of digital innovation, artistic expression, and compassion. Contributors have included Brenda Hillman, Robert Bly, Evie Shockley, Alice Fulton, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Alicia Ostriker, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Lia Purpura, Patricia Smith, Joseph O. Legaspi and Idra Novey.
Build with us.
CURA Creative Writing Workshops
Acclaimed poet and professor, Tyehimba Jess led creative writing workshops for The Doe Fund at The Harlem Center for Opportunity location on April 5th and 12th.
Born in Detroit, poet Tyehimba Jess earned his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA from New York University. Jess is the rare poet who bridges slam and academic poetry. His first collection,leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three poetry books of the year by Black Issues Book Review. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that “the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent.” A two-time member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was also Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Soulfires: Young Black Men in Love and Violence (1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones (2004). He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (2003). His honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award. A former artist-in-residence with Cave Canem, Jess has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, as well as a Lannan Writing Residency. Jess has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the College of Staten Island in New York City.
Here are 3 poems written in these workshops by the men at the Harlem Creative Writing Workshop at The Doe Fund.
Untitled
Harlem woke me up out of my 5 am dream
The A train rumbled and screamed beneath my feet
Harlem's children chased after ice cream
trucks. The Apollo jammed to its cinnamon sugar beat.
125th sings out its solicitations,
while Ruckers Park lights up like Times Square.
The people of Harlem shake to a different drum
while other people gawk and stare.
Meanwhile, hustlers smell the scene of easy prey,
He starts his chase in his Harlem way. "What's up slick?
I got what you need." He needs a mark to stay
While he is scheming on his next trick.
This is the Harlem way, all day, everyday.
Cold blooded hustlers doin' it for their children's fate.
Untitled
The Streets of New York bruise the peoples' ego. They yell police sirens and ice cream trucks.
The Streets of New York whisper prayers for the soothing of pain.
The Streets don't show mercy or love. They stab the air out of basketballs.
They steal Huffys after promising only to ride to the corner.
They trick them to fight for foolish fun.
The Streets of New York hide them under cars, in trees, in dumpsters and down alleys
when they play manhunt.
The black topped streets play skullie with the children.
Overlooked
Red, black and gun metal gray is his uniform.
Bullets in the wind or bombs in the park are his trade.
Sarcasm, humor and cleverness is norm.
Deadpool is his name, A spade that often fades.
You've whispered to him and you never knew.
Changing his mind is what this villain is trying to do.
Buried deep inside is a thing that just grew and grew.
The truth set him free and now he's hunting you.
The fantastic four death started his crusade.
Both heroes and villain were facing death.
But in the end all efforts were in vain.
Deadpool could not be stopped, no one could catch their breath.
It's you that is source of his rage.
He's trying to stop you from turning the page.