Poetry Program 5 – 7pm
Videos screened at 7pm

Works will be viewable in the Flux Gallery from 1 - 5pm.

Please RSVP so that we can keep our numbers to a COVID safe amount. Please

Flux Factory is happy to be hosting THREADS, an exhibition curated by an international collective of arts organizations from Bogotá, NYC, Manila and Chicago: Bliss on Bliss Arts Projects, Maleza Proyectos, Nodo 51 Area Cultural, Poets of Queens and Yara Arts Group.
The THREADS Project and its expanding global network helps artists and audiences establish a dialogue between images and poetry to find greater connections and understanding in these difficult times. This exhibition at Flux Factory, is an introduction to a THREADS future and an opportunity to stand in solidarity against the violence being enacted upon our Asian family members and communities.

THREADS is curated by Virlana Tkacz, founding director of Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York since 1990. Olena Jennings, the curator and founder of Poets of Queens, acts as poetry curator.

Participating Artists
Catalina Bolivar, Juliana Canal, Waldemart Klyuzko, Cayla Lockwood, Isabella Lopez, Ged Merino, Aze Ong, and Jevijoe Vitug.

Participating Poets
Pichchenda Bao, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Olena Jennings, and Wanda Phipps.

Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American writer and poet, infant survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, daughter of refugees, and feminist stay-at-home mother in New York City. Her work has been published by the Adirondack Review, New Ohio Review, great weather for MEDIA, Newtown Literary and elsewhere. She was a 2019 emerging writer fellow at the Aspen Words summer writers’ conference, and is an incoming fellow at the Kundiman writers’ retreat.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (2021), and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). Her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears in Black Warrior Review (2020), is part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets, which she began in 2019, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. She is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. In 2017, her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial; Museum in NYC and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Recently, her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. She writes for The Kenyon Review blog.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment and the chapbook Memory Project. She is a 2018 recipient of a New Work Grant from the Queens Council of the Arts for which she performed Memory Project at Queens Farm and created textile art inspired by the poems. Her textile art was also displayed at Red Barn in MA and
Bliss on Bliss in NYC. She is also the co-author with Rachel Lallouz of the hand-sewn chapbook After Tbilisi that was performed in the Red Room, NYC. She has also performed with Yara Arts Group, and at the Ukrainian Museum, the Ukrainian Sports Club, and the Shevchenko Scientific Society. She has studied sewing with Patti Gilstrap in Brooklyn. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series

Wanda Phipps is a writer/translator and author of the books Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems among others. Her poetry has been published over 100 times and translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician and Bangla. She's curated several reading/performance series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church; is a founding member of Yara Arts Group; and has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Agni Journal, the National Theater Translation Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her next full-length book of original poetry is forthcoming from Autonomedia.