A Paper Cuts Reading Featuring Belladonna*

Paper Cuts hosts an evening of readings with members of the feminist avant-garde literary collective Belladonna* at Pioneer Books in Brooklyn. The night will feature readings from Erica Hunt, Betsy Fagin, Rachel Levitsky, and Christina Olivares.

Paper Cuts is an exploration of the contemporary world of zines and DIY publishing, produced by Clocktower. Each program features writers, performers, and artists who have shared their work in print, on paper, and in small editions. Zines are truly dynamic publications that have built and supported engaged communities around ideals, experiences, genres, music, politics, poetry... anything that can be printed, shared, and/or mailed. The series acts as a cross section of this varied landscape and rich history. Listen to voices that would normally live in your hands and demand your eyeballs. Paper Cuts is taking the show on the road with a series of events at bookstores and alternative spaces in the New York City area.

Belladonna* is a feminist avant-garde collective, founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky. 2016 marks the 17th anniversary of the Belladonna* mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable and dangerous with language.

Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History and Arcade, as well as three chapbooks, Piece Logic, Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree, and Conjunctions. Her essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation, and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Cape Town Program in Public Policy. She has been writer in residence in the Contemporary Poetics/Creative Writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, writer in residence at Bard College's MFA program, Northwestern University and Long Island University, and a repeat faculty member for Cave Canem, a workshop for black writers from 2004 to 2015. An anthology of innovative writing by black women co-edited with Dawn Lundy Martin is forthcoming in 2016 from Kore Press.

Betsy Fagin is the author of All is Not Yet Lost (Belladonna*, 2015), Names Disguised (Make Now Books, 2014), Poverty Rush (Three Sad Tigers, 2011), the science seemed so solid (dusie kollektiv, 2011), Belief Opportunity (Big Game Books Tinyside, 2008), Rosemary Stretch (dusie e/chap, 2006), For every solution there is a problem (Open 24 Hours, 2003), and a number of self-published chapbooks. Currently, Fagin serves as Editor for the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Rachel Levitsky is writing a memoir through the lens of what’s between Julie Christie and Warren Beatty on screen in Shampoo and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Her last book was The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem 2013). She is a member and was a founder of the Belladonna* Collaborative and she teaches in the Pratt MFA in Writing.

Christina Olivares' first full-length book of poetry, No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her chaplet, Interrupt, was published by Belladonna* Collaborative in 2015. Petition, winner of the 2014 YesYes/Vinyl Chapbook Competition, will be published in 2016. She was awarded a 2015-2016 LMCC Workspace Residency and is the recipient of two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants. She earned her MFA at CUNY Brooklyn College and her undergraduate degree at Amherst College.