The Beauty of the Beast: Queer Poetry Night
681 Venice Blvd, Venice, California 90291
Friday, February 28 at 8:00 PM 10:00 PM
Ends Feb 28, 2020
LOS ANGELES, CA, February 28th 2020—As a part of Influx’s free monthly queer poetry reading series, the series’ February 28th event will begin at 8pm at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts (681 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90291) and will feature LA based queer poets: Ryka Aoki, Cori Bratby-Rudd, Féi Hernandez, Christine Imperial, Hank Henderson, among others. This particular event is unique—Influx Collectiv is collaborating with Dissonance Press and all performing queer poets are therefore also contributors to Dissonance’s first anthology, Under The Belly of the Beast (edited by Cori Bratby-Rudd) which will be available for purchase at the show. This themed queer poetry night is called, “The Beauty of the Beast.” The Facebook event has all of the event descriptions posted (including accessibility information). About Influx: Founded in 2018, Influx is now run by its original co-founder Cori Bratby-Rudd and collaborator Diana Gutierrez (who often hosts). Influx Collectiv is a queer poetry reading series that connects LA based poets, promotes queer events, and provides a space and platform for queer creators and queer content. Influx is for audience members to hear stories that reflect their own, and for performers to find an audience who understands. We host events monthly and each reading features new poets and takes place at a different location throughout Los Angeles. Influx Collectiv was recently featured in an article by VoyageLA, the Alhambra Source, and the Occidental. We can be found through our website, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. About Dissonance Press: Dissonance Press is a workspace and test platform for writing projects that subvert or repurpose how literature is made and read. By doing so, we hope to foster modes of writing that creatively respond to expectations, limitations, and exclusions of the literary machine. We seek work that actively challenges the perception of the author as solitary genius, in favor of work that stresses collaboration, serialization, and creation of shared narrative. We also produce works in overlooked genres, such as prayer books, photo albums, quilts, cookbooks and letters, that help uncover the ingenuity and brilliance of writers whose cultural, religious, economic, and social positions made it difficult or impossible to create work within traditional literary forms. About Under The Belly of the Beast: Once upon a time, a group of writers queered the concept of beasts and beauties. Combining these creations into an anthology, forthcoming this February 2020 by Dissonance Press, each compelling piece ranges in topic and dismantles common tropes, villains and heroes in a world not too far off of our own. This collection of poetry, prose, and short-fiction centers the voices of marginalized communities. From poems that detail a coming-of-age story from the perspective of a black (assigned) girl (at birth) & the beastly notions of black girlhood & sexuality she is forced to experience, to a fictional story about a beast named Mednick who lives out his life in a zoo, each author took the idea of a beast, and found queerness lurking in its definition.