Franklin Electric Reading Series
650 Franklin Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Last night writers piled into the new Work Heights community space in Crown Heights, BK, for the inaugural Franklin Electric Reading Series. The series is hosted by NYU CWP alumna, Victoria Kornick, her roommate Will Frazier, and current NYU students Jordan Bolden and Jessie Marion Modi (our assistant poetry editor here at ONSQU!). Friends since undergrad, they are all Virginia transplants living and working in Brooklyn.
Coordinators: Jordan Bolden, Will Frazier, Victoria Kornick, and Jessie Marion Modi
Free beer was provided by Blue Point Brewing, along with some weirdly dense quinoa cheese balls. Standing room only after the 40 seats were filled, the audience steamed up the glass windows behind the stage.
First, Joseph Alexiou read from his recently published book Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal, a charming history of long-maligned waterway. He read from the prologue about the time in 2007 when a baby whale (called by Sludgy the Whale in the headlines) wandered into the polluted canal, allowing for whale-watching to briefly become a pastime in New York City.
Priscilla Becker, author of Internal West, read poems with a dead pan commentary and gave the audience short lessons in prosody. She warned us about the homophone of lie and lye coming up, though “If you don’t know what lye is . . . I’m not going to tell you." You can read her work here and here.
Ama Codjoe, current MFA candidate in poetry at NYU, and Cave Canem fellow, read us poems. Her work often plays off of visual art, including this series of Untitled self portrait poems. You can check out her work at The Feminist Wire, Apex Magazine, and elsewhere.
Lastly ONSQU’s own Kate Doyle, assistant fiction editor, closed the night with a short story. Check out Kate’s work at The Meridian where she recently won the 2015 flash fiction contest!
Charlotte was stirring her hot chocolate rapidly. Listen, I was saying. Using the term “break-up” when you are explicitly not dating is like saying you’re definitively abandoning your career in the ballet when you’ve been to class maybe 2-4 times ever in your life and all those times you just talked about how much you really weren’t sure about ballet. Charlotte said, You said this to me yesterday. I said, I did?
“That Is Shocking” by Kate Doyle
Kate Doyle, assistant fiction editor, and Andy Sanchez, interviews editor. They happen to be in love.
Jordan Bolden, post-reading glow
Viki Sanz, recent interviewee, Francisco Márquez, assistant interviews editor, and Alisha Kaplan co- pr & web editor
If you’re interested in reading at a future event, send the coordinators an email at reading@workheights.com. Franklin Electric Reading Series will be back next month!