Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP) features authors moving across disciplinary boundaries, crossing performance, sound, image, and text. The work by Ellie Ga, Zahra Patterson, Mike Taylor, and Asiya Wadud combines narrative, essay, and poetry, fusing personal and historical material culminating in an evening of part reading, part performance.
Ugly Duckling Presse and Mount Tremper Arts are pleased to present four authors moving across disciplinary boundaries, crossing performance, sound, image, and text.
Zahra Patterson / Chronology
Taking as its starting point an ultimately failed attempt to translate a Sesotho short story into English, Chronology explores the spaces language occupies in relationships, colonial history, and our postcolonial past. It is a collage of images and documents, folding on words-that- follow-no-chronology, unveiling layers of meaning of queering love, friendship, death, and power.
Ellie Ga / The Eoliths
In the late 19th and early 20th century, eoliths (from the Greek word eos, meaning dawn, and lith, meaning stone) were widely accepted as the oldest human hand tools and were celebrated as the dawn of civilization in Europe. In this work in progress, Ga narrates aspects of the eolith debate.
Asiya Wadud / Syncope
A book-length poem about the wholesale abandonment of a boat off the coast of Tripoli containing 72 refugees and migrants, which drifted for two weeks before it doubled back to its point of origin. All but 9 of the passengers died during the drift.
Mike Taylor / This Is What Happened
Taylor has spent the last week in Phoenicia and Woodstock collecting local dreams.
About Ugly Ducking Presse
Ugly Duckling Presse, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a Brooklyn-based small press by a volunteer editorial collective that has published more than 200 titles to date. UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking. In all its activities, UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility.
Performance Program