A Reading with Edgar Garcia & Fred Schmalz

A reading and discussion with Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, and Fred Schmalz, author of Action in the Orchards. They will be joined in conversation by Harris Feinsod. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

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About Action in the Orchards: In his debut poetry collection, Fred Schmalz transforms encounters—with art and architecture, friends and strangers, past and future—into irreverent, musical meditations on art-making, daily life, love, and mortality. Through a kaleidoscope of speech fragments, elisions, leaps, and wordplay, the poems invoke rich sensory and emotional perspectives.

About Fred Schmalz: Fred Schmalz is the author of Action in the Orchards (Nightboat Books, 2019). He is an artist and poet whose recent writing focuses on textual response to encounters with dance, music, and visual art. In 2018, he was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as poet-in-residence for the FluxConcert in its year-long Fluxus Festival. His field guide Claes Oldenburg's Festival of Living Objects was published in conjunction with a series of gallery walks by the Walker Art Center in 2013. He makes art in the collective Balas & Wax.

About Skins of Columbus: Colonial violence is a sticky phenomenon, gumming up the associational matrices of our daily lives and dreamscapes. In Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), Edgar Garcia intervenes with a poetic experiment: every night of the three months of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, Garcia read his corresponding journal entry before sleep. Asleep, his mind sutures displacements, migrations, and restorations into an assemblage of hemispheric becoming.

About Edgar Garcia: Edgar Garcia is a scholar of hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the 20th century. His work has explored the fields of indigenous and Latino studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019) and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2019). He also co-edited American Literature in the World (Columbia University Press, 2016), which examines the transnational contexts of a national literary tradition. He is the recipient of a BA in English with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in English from Yale University. He is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in the Department of Creative Writing.

About Harris Feinsod: Harris Feinsod is the author The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, 2017) and the co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018). His essays on literature and art appear in journals such as American Literary History, Modernism/modernity, and n+1. He is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he is a core faculty member in the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and the director of Open Door Archive.