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Press Room
Press Room is an ongoing series through the Guild Literary Complex that explores topics often shunned by the media, offering a view from both a personal and literary perspective.
Press Room engages audiences in topics and discussions related to current events, highlighting individual, first-person voices impacted by important contemporary conversations. Each Press Room event is organized around a widely discussed topic in the press that directly impacts members of Chicago’s many communities.
CURRENT PRESS ROOM PROGRAMS:
Past Press Room Events:
September 2024
Sep
06
06
September
2024
Transvengence | September 2024
Clash on Clark,
4416 N. Clark St.
Chicago,
Illinois
60640
September’s Transvengence features Aza Greenlee with your host, Joss Barton. Doors open and open mic sign-up begins at 7pm. Aza Greenlee is a body artist and co-conspirator at No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab. This coalescence is one to galavant in dreamscapes, ancestral juke joints, chaturbate masturbation web temples, loose-tooth tanks, and The Heartspace. They organize “Smudge Cinema Project”, a now-and-then-wait-when? screening series that takes a look at what happens when a film is projected on a wall for people to watch. Metabolization seems to be what they appear to do, lately.
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June 2024
Jun
18
18
June
2024
Transvengence: Pride Edition
Clash on Clark,
4416 N. Clark St.
Chicago,
Illinois
60640
June 2024: Transvengence, Pride Month – Turn Up! Edition Featuring Jack and Lynzo the Heartthrob, with your host, Joss Barton. Open mic starts at 7:30pm. Learn more about Transvengence here. Lynzo The Heartthrob is a born & bred Chicagoan; an exotic dancer with a background in ballet, modern, and African dance teachings. Emceeing/producing Black LGBTQIA events, Mixology, Plus Size Styling, Dance (both exotic and traditional) teachings carries Lynzo across the stages of Chicago, Los Angeles, & London, England. Chicago’s Big Titty Heartbreaker! Jack is a 25 year old transsexual woman who has lived in Chicago since 2023. Like her trans […]
Free
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February 2024
Feb
13
13
February
2024
Transvengence: Valentine’s Day Edition
Clash on Clark,
4416 N. Clark St.
Chicago,
Illinois
60640
Transvengence: Valentine’s Day Edition; open mic starts at 7:30pm.
Free
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September 2023
Sep
07
07
September
2023
Transvengence feat. C. Russell Price and Trinity Sapphire (+ Open Mic)
Clash on Clark,
4416 N. Clark St.
Chicago,
Illinois
60640
Join your host Joss Barton for Transvengence on Thursday, September 7th! This month features performances by C. Russell Price and Trinity Sapphire, followed by a discussion and open mic.
Free
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July 2023
Jul
19
19
July
2023
“…Advice at the beginning of the revolution” with Michael Warr + Tongo Eisen-Martin
Haymarket House,
800 W. Buena Ave.
Chicago,
Illinois
As part of our Press Room series, join us for a reading and discussion with Bay Area authors, Michael Warr and Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Fransisco Poet Laureate) about their work, the nature of protest, and how the historical acts of revolution during the heyday of the Black Power Movement in the Bay Area have influenced literary activism in a post-George Floyd era of radical social change. “. . .Advice at the beginning of the revolution” is a line from Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poem “A Good Earth” and serves as a framework for this important conversation. **We ask that all attendees wear […]
Free
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June 2023
Jun
20
20
June
2023
TransVengence | Aza Greenlee, Noa/Nomi Micaela Fields, and Ava Mirage Wanbli on June 20th
My Buddy’s (Upstairs),
4416 N Clark St.
Chicago,
Illinois
60640
United States
Join us for TransVengence with your host, Joss Barton! This month features readings by Aza Greenlee, Noa/Moni Micaela Fields, and Ava Mirage Wanbli. Doors open at 7pm upstairs at My Buddy’s! Featuring: Noa Micaela (Nomi) Fields is an echodeviant* (*trans poets with hearing aids) in search of transversal wildness in her one and only captionless life. Find her poems and other writing in Tripwire, Anomaly, Zoeglossia, Elderly, Tyger Quarterly, and Sixty Inches From Center. She is a programming curator at the Poetry Foundation and a 2022 Fellow at Disability Lead and Zoeglossia. Aza Greenlee is a body artist and co-conspirator at No […]
Free
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April 2023
Apr
26
26
April
2023
Transvengence | Maurice Tracy + Open Mic on April 26th
My Buddy’s (Upstairs),
4416 N Clark St.
Chicago,
Illinois
60640
United States
Transvengence is back! Launched in 2022 as part of the Guild’s Press Room series, the brainchild of your host, Joss Barton, a trans performer, poet and writer. This event will include an open mic and feature: Maurice Tracy from St Louis. Maurice Tracy is a transfemme at the beginning of their journey. They are a social worker, a cultural critic—at least in their mind—, a home cook, a lover, a slut, possibly a writer, and a fat dark skin being trying to live and love and help make a better world than the one we’ve been asked to live in.
Free
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Surviving the Mic: Speaking Poetry to Power
American Gun Book Launch and Performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9V1tvE6rV4&feature=emb_logo
Incarcerated: Stories,
Poetry and Perspectives
– 2019
U-Turn Film Screening –
2019