New York’s queer storysharing event!
Join us for the next Queer Memoir salon! THEME: The Next Morning
Queer Memoir: The Next Morning
Saturday, May 22, @ 8 pm
Brooklyn, NY
FREE
The event is FREE, but we’ll pass the hat for cash to help support the future of QM. To learn more about Queer Memoir and how you can share your work at upcoming events, check out queermemoir.com.
With storytellers:
André Azevedo
Kelli Dunham (host)
Nedra Johnson
Kestryl Cael Lowrey
J.L. Mecum
Genne Murphy (host)
Stephanie Schroeder
Venn Diagrams
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BIOS
ANDRE AZEVEDO – is a self-identified foreigner and tranny fag bulldyke. He’s also been known to make art and good Brazilian food; his favorite thing in life is to sit around a table and talk with people. He’s a sex-positive, kink-positive polyamorous person who is always dancing on the thin line between enthusiastic optimism and abject cynicism.
KELLI DUNHAM is a ex-nun, butch-identified stand-up comic and author of four books of humorous non-fiction, including two children’s books being used by a conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum. She has appeared on Showtime, the Discovery Channel and was once asked to emcee a livestock auction. Her website is kellidunham.com. She is the co-founder, with Genne Murphy, of Queer Memoir.
NEDRA JOHNSON – Nedra Johnson is a singer/songwriter multi-instrumentalist born & living in New York City. Her unique style of guitar playing is unmistakably informed by her many years as a professional bassist and keeps her live solo acoustic performances more on an R&B tip then what one might expect of a “girl with a guitar.” Nedra’s self-titled sophomore release is a 2006 OUTMUSIC Award (OUTSTANDING NEW RECORDING – FEMALE) winning, joyful mix of R&B, funk, rock and gospel. Honest in integrity to the music as well as the lyrical content, each song is a testimony of her experience as a black openly lesbian woman in love, spirituality, community and or politics. Nedra has performed internationally at jazz, blues, pride & women’s music festivals as a solo artist and a tuba player/vocalist with her father Howard Johnson & his group, Gravity. She surprised and impressed jazz audiences in Paris, Nime, Berlin, Vienna, Kassel, Macedonia, Muchen, Leverkusen, Los Angeles, New York & New Orleans when she put down her tuba and sang original songs with Gravity garnering such praises as from The Orange County Register, “A little thing [an original from the CD Testify ] called Working Hard for the Joneses had the crowd on its feet and whooping.” As a soloist, she has performed in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Cleveland, Madison, Chicago, New Caledonia and more! Whether in front of an intimate audience such as at New York City’s Rockwood Music Hall or a large festival audience of 7000 like Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Nedra has the ability to perform with both a strength and a vulnerability that makes each listener feel like they are getting to know her on a personal level. Her thoughtful choice of words reflect not only who she is, but speak to the heart in a way that mirrors emotions many find difficult to express, allowing her a fan base diverse in ethnic, cultural and spiritual background.
KESTRYL CAEL LOWREY – Whether on-stage or behind a podium, Kestryl Cael Lowrey considers it his artistic duty to engage his audiences in provocative dialogue without letting them take him (or themselves) too seriously. Kestryl Cael was a member of “The Language of Paradox,” a performance ensemble founded and directed by Kate Bornstein. His writing appears in anthologies such as Kicked Out, and he is half of the performance duo, PoMo Freakshow. His one‐queer‐show, XY(T), has delighted and stimulated audiences from coast to coast, provoking dialogue and fostering change at colleges and communities across the country. It has received critical acclaim, described as “provocative,” “appealingly wry,” “profound,” and “essential.” Kestryl Cael is currently developing 348, his newest solo performance piece. 348 is a searing examination of the troubled teen industry and madness in America, rooted in Kestryl’s own experiences of being held against his will in a “therapeutic boarding school” as a teenager. In addition to performing, Kestryl Cael also lectures and leads workshops for colleges, conferences, community groups, and other organizations. He has appeared at conferences, colleges, festivals, and local theatres across North America. Recent appearances include Kingsborough Community College, Man Enough: The NYU Colloquium on Masculinity, Bard College, the Lewis & Clark College Gender Studies Symposium, and The Inhumanity Conference at York University.
J. L. MECUM was born in a plaid button-up on a cold December morning. The doctors swaddled her in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly and the warmth of its pages secured her destiny. Once freed from the Lower-Middle Class School District of Elmira Heights, NY, she enrolled in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts to study playwrighting alongside classmate and future-Queer Memoir organizer Genne Murphy. (In fact, the last time she performed was in Genne’s piece entitled “Coney Island.”) These days she can be found in Brooklyn training her tortoise to update her Netflix queue, putting cheese and hot sauce on anything or having passionate arguments with the Pantone Color Matching System. She plans to be a lawyer and pass away in a very nice pair of shoes.
GENNE MURPHY is a Philadelphia native, playwright, and queer femme. She’s passionate about the intersection of the arts, social change, and community-building. Genne also works for a Philadelphia-based arts education non-profit, and is involved with initiatives to expand new play development in her hometown. Genne likes to hang out with fellow storytellers, dreamers, and schemers. She is the co-founder, with Kelli Dunham, of Queer Memoir.
STEPHANIE SCHROEDER is an anti-assimilationist queer feminist dyke who lives and works as a freelance writer in Brooklyn. She is a Contributing Editor at Curve Magazine and writes the Hooked-Up Blog for Curve’s website. She also writes for Shewired.com, Go! Magazine and is the movie reviewer/celebrity interviewer for Lesbian Life at About.com. Schroeder has been working on her memoir, Beautiful Wreck: Sex, Lies & Suicide, for far too long. She is definitely going to finish the book this summer. You can read more about Schroeder and find some of her journalism at http://www.stephanieschroeder.com
VENN DIAGRAMS: Jeffrey Marsh and Rick Sorkin have been working together since 2001. They blend classic cabaret, modern composition / performance and audience interaction. Basically, if they like it, it makes it into the show. That can be a joke about The Golden Girls or a 1930’s German war song. The duo cut their teeth playing the night club circuit in the early days, touring the act around NE America. Highlights have included a project with an 11 piece rock orchestra and SRO shows in venues like Joe’s Pub, Knitting Factory and World Cafe Live.
Queer Memoir 