Perigee

Christopher Soto is the founder and curator of Nepantla, a new online journal featuring the writing of Queer Poets of Color. Nepantla offers not only a new creative space for poetry to thrive, but a new way to look at what a literary community can be. The Journal will go live next month, and Apogee Journal and Columbia’s Our Word are thrilled to be collaborating on the launch reading September 4th. Cecca Ochoa (CO): How did Nepantla come about? Christopher Soto (CS): I was talking trash with Jameson Fitzpatrick about white supremacy and the New York queer literary scene. He gave me the idea to start a QPOC journal and then introduced me to William Johnson at Lambda, who helped me get the project started. The first thing Nepantla hosted was a dinner at NYU. We invited all the Queer Poets of Color that we knew in NYC and sat to discuss our community’s needs. Shout out to everyone who attended our first dinner: Rigoberto Gonzalez, Eduardo C. Corral, r. erica doyle, Pamela Sneed, Timothy Liu, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Juliet P. Howard, Charif Shanahan, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Rickey Laurentiis, Alok Vaid-Menon, Janani Bala, Jerome Murphy, Tommy Pico, Eden...

Fiction

Spotlight on Issue 3: Chinelo Okparanta

Zinzi Clemmons

28 Jul 2014

Chinelo Okparanta’s story, “Ife Adigo Market—1978” appears in Issue 3 of Apogee Journal. Her first story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was released in 2013, and was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best African Fiction of 2013. Chinelo and I corresponded about politics in writing, immigration, and the discomfort of labels. Zinzi Clemmons: Your story in Issue 3, “Ife Adigo Market—1978”, describes the changes that occur in a Nigerian town that coincide with the arrival of white people—ndi ochas. Can you describe the events that inspired this story? Chinelo Okparanta: The story was inspired by an event that happened to my mom when she was a girl. She, too, had fallen ill and had nearly gone blind when she was young. The story was also inspired by some of my time back home in Nigeria, periods in which there were questions surrounding the quality of medicines being sold there. Knock-off items exist everywhere, but the issue of counterfeit medicines was especially problematic during that time. “Ife Adigo Market” illustrates the battle between old world and new world and the confusion over the better way to go: the native doctors or the new medicines. There’s a sort of hopelessness but also...

Poetry Uncategorized

Ai Weiwei in New York City: An Interview with Kelly Tsai

Apogee Journal

22 Jul 2014

Kelly Tsai is a spoken word poet, writer, performer and director, whose latest work AI WEI WEI: THE SEED is an exploration of Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei’s early life in New York City. The performance traces the years before Weiwei became internationally renowned for his provocative, political art. Apogee Editor-at-large Melody Nixon talked with Tsai about her upcoming show and whether art and politics can ever be separated. Melody Nixon (MN): How did you first come across Ai Weiwei’s work? Kelly Tsai (KT): Back in 2012 I was in Taipei, Taiwan, and I saw Ai Weiwei’s exhibit at the contemporary fine arts museum there. When I was walking through the exhibit I saw all these photos of street corners that I knew in Brooklyn and the East Village and I was like, “wait a second, what are these?” Then I realized that Ai Weiwei had actually spent much of his 20’s and 30’s (1981-1993) in NYC as a young artist, which I thought was really interesting. MN: That inspired you to investigate his life story? KT: Yes. With a little more research, I found out that his father was a political poet and he also was friends with many...

Fiction

Spotlight on Issue 3: James Yeh

Apogee Journal

09 Jul 2014

James Yeh’s “Your Giant New Loft” appears in Apogee Issue III. The brief story tours the expensive home of a friend you didn’t know had money while exploring class anxiety along the way. I spoke with James about the piece, his writing, and more. Scott Dievendorf: Part of Apogee’s mission is to publish literature that interrogates the status quo and engages with issues of identity politics. Not all of your work is explicitly political and I wouldn’t necessarily classify you as a political author, though your piece in our current issue certainly speaks to class anxiety. Do you ever feel a personal urgency to explore issues of class, race, or other facets of identity through your fiction? In other words, what are your personal feelings about using literature as means of social inquiry? James Yeh: That’s a tough question to answer because on the one hand, of course I’m interested in class and race and issues of identity. As the son of Taiwanese immigrants to South Carolina, where I was born and grew up, there isn’t much choice. Questions of race and identity come to you—sometimes at you. That said, I’m less interested in work that strikes me as wholly or...

Poetry

David Mura on The Last Incantations

Apogee Journal

24 Jun 2014

David Mura is a contributor, advocate, and advisory board member of Apogee. He is a poet, memoirist, novelist, playwright, critic, and performance artist. Mura’s most recent work is the poetry collection The Last Incantations. He is also the author of three other books of poetry: After We Lost Our Way, The Colors of Desire, and Angels for the Burning. His prose work includes the memoirs Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory, and the novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. Crystal Kim (CK): As Creative Nonfiction Editor of Apogee, I read and immensely enjoyed working with you on Bondage & Liberation for Apogee’s Issue 3. It was exciting to dip into your writing in another form—poetry. How does your new collection of poetry, The Last Incantations, differ from your previous books? David Mura (DM): In my earlier books, particularly The Colors of Desire, there was a significant focus on my identity specifically as a Japanese American and on the history of my community. I was trying to transfer and reflect some of the discoveries I’d made in my memoirs. In a way, I had to write those memoirs to create an intellectual, cultural and historical context...

Poetry

Taking it Lying Down: An Interview with R. Erica Doyle

Apogee Journal

18 Jun 2014

“You have come to do an autopsy and at the first excision found a beating heart.” R. Erica Doyle’s Proxy cuts with terrifying precision as it performs an autopsy on desire. Proxy was published by Belladonna* and won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. I sat down with Doyle to discuss. Cecca Ochoa: How did Proxy begin? R.Erica Doyle: The origin of Proxy was an exercise in exposure and vulnerability. I was in Patricia Smith’s workshop, and there was an exercise to write about a taboo. Not something that is a taboo in society, but what is taboo to you. Maybe it is taboo to you to write about piercing your nipples, but I don’t really care. At the time what was taboo was writing about the really fucked up things that women did to each other in relationships. Right now there is this call out culture, but it’s not really happening in a real way, in my opinion. CO: It’s a game, now. RED: Yeah, it’s a game. People are not calling out some real things that they could call out. But, that was something that a couple...

Poetry Uncategorized

Spotlight on Issue 3: Cynthia Dewi Oka

Apogee Journal

16 Jun 2014

Two poems by Apogee Issue 3 Featured Artist Cynthia Dewi Oka Tabuh Rah I. After the wounds are scraped the blood flaked to sawdust the feathers black snow around her ankles, she will bite into the bird and drink like a coyote or child of Cain, roll the sour heat across her tongue; she will become a weapon. II. The loose bolt of the jugular. The wrench of the tongue. Inside her the hands of men churn like Pacific storms. Gleam of coin toss, then the rat-tat-tat polemics of a dead revolution. III. The bets are placed. Tourists fiddle with their cameras. The cocks are thrown into the pit, armed with their bodies, slick with god: whatever knife plays within us, what Lorca called duende, will mark its territory tonight. IV. The spectacle cleanses the witness. Tradition and formlessness both demand a good death. When it is over, the sun like a fat white spider resumes its weaving, in and out of Bintang beer bottles, the ditches where children bathe, the wax paper kites that pin up the sky. V. She sucks the bones dry. Each flightless bird’s eye that will not close again. In the caves of memory, where...

Uncategorized

Spotlight on Issue 3: José Esteban Muñoz and Rebecca Sumner Burgos

Apogee Journal

11 Jun 2014

I was wasting time online the other day, thinking about writing this essay on what the legacy of José Esteban Muñoz means to me- a person who never knew him, but experiences a synapses changing euphoria when I read his work. Online, I came across a picture of a friend in an airplane. They - gender ambiguous, creature-like, with their wildly colored hair and their face painted neon- tongued their lip in the direction of their neighbor, a regal transwoman. Behind these two, another happy-looking queer (the only other figure in the picture) winked into the camera. For a moment, I allowed myself to daydream that the entire plane was filled with queers. I imagined an aircraft hurtling 500 miles per hour, 35,000 feet above the earth, where every being chose their own unique gender and performed it without inhibition. Then I opened Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia and underlined the first sentence: “Queerness is not yet here.” Muñoz takes queerness as the wilderness of identity. He captures ephemeral moments where queerness exposes itself to the present. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, he defines utopias: “They are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the...

Visual Art

Silent Auction Items

Apogee Journal

21 May 2014

Still haven’t bought a ticket to our joint benefit with MoCADA this Thursday? If the readings by acclaimed writers Cathy Park Hong, Kiese Laymon, Mahogany Browne, and Saeed Jones, the installation by artist Shantell Martin, and being among the first to get your copy of Apogee Issue 3, isn’t motivation enough, then check out our silent auction items. (Oh, and if you have bought your ticket, maybe you should start thinking strategically about how to have your name last on the list when the auction closes…) Silent Auction Items: GOTHAM WRITERS WORKSHOP ONE DAY WRITING INTENSIVE Admission to a One- Day Intensive with Gotham Writers Workshop, New York City’s leading private creative writing school. Intensives are fun, fast-paced immersions in a genre of writing of your choice. Ideal for both the beginner and someone wanting a quick refresher course. Value, $150 each (2 for auction) ENTRANCE FOR TWO TO THE NEW YORK WRITERS’ COALITION WRITE-A-THON Two tickets to the New York Writers’ Coalition Write-A-Thon, New York City’s most popular marathon writing event, to be held on November 1st 2014. Value, $300 THE DEVIL IN SILVER AND BIG MACHINE, BY VICTOR LaVALLE Signed, hard cover editions of two novels by acclaimed fiction writer...