In-Person and Online: Artist Salon Presents - A Night of Readings Celebrating Big Other

Location: New York Insight at 115 West 29th Street, 12th Floor Seventeen years: a little while, a long while, a breath, a blink. To celebrate, Big Other is gathering a grand constellation of writers from across the journal’s history for an evening of readings, reunion, remembrance, and marvel-making. We’ll come together to listen to words, pauses, echoes, and the fleeting shapes they make together. Seventeen years ago, John Madera launched Big Other as an adventurous, open-ended forum for writers and artists interested in the places where forms, media, genres, and ideas collide. From the beginning, the journal was conceived as a place for formally innovative work—a place to consider how images, language, and sound shape and reshape us; to explore the strange territories opened up by technology; and to follow whatever becomings, crossings, trespasses, and unexpected associations might emerge along the way. Big Other has always created room for writing that wanders beyond borders: poetry and prose, experiment and accident, the serious and the strange, the luminous and the unconventional. Big Other has published work by Pulitzer Prize winners Rae Armantrout and Forrest Gander, National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner and current U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, Grand Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy Samuel R. Delany, American Book Award winner Edwin Torres, Charles Bernstein, Robert Coover, Elaine Equi, Rick Moody, Lance Olsen, Cole Swensen, and a host of other stellar writers. In other words, Big Other is less an object than an ongoing exchange—a marvelous continuum made by the people who pass through it. For this anniversary gathering, we’ll hear from Martine Bellen, Elaine Equi, Heller Levinson, Dawn Raffel, Terese Svoboda, and Edwin Torres, each reading from work that has appeared in Big Other. The evening will be emceed by John Madera, who launched Big Other in 2009 as an (im)possibility space for unruly, fearless, surprising, formally adventurous work—for writers working across genres, making strange objects out of language, and treating criticism as a creative practice. There will be no attempt to gather seventeen years into a single story. There are too many gaps, crossings, departures, accidents, and unfinished happenings for that. Instead, we’ll spend an evening together in the midst of it: attending to the marvelous pleasure of finding ourselves, briefly, among one another. So come sit with us as the constellation appears. Come hear what the writers have carried forward, what has fallen away, and what might arise in the space between us. All proceeds from the evening will help support the programming efforts of New York Insight Meditation Center. Emcee John Madera John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024), Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026), and Among the Dynamos (BlazeVOX [books], publication date: TBD). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other. The Writers Martine Bellen Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, including Anatomy of Curiosity, This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems, The Vulnerability of Order, and Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, which won the National Poetry Series Award. Her work has appeared widely in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. She is also a librettist whose operas and collaborative performance works have been presented in the United States and abroad. Elaine Equi Elaine Equi is the author of nearly a dozen books of poetry, including Out of the Blank, The Intangibles, Sentences and Rain, and Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems. Her work, informed by surrealism, concrete poetry, classical Chinese poetry, and other traditions, is known for its precision, wit, and deceptively direct surfaces. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry in 2023 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. Heller Levinson Heller Levinson is a poet whose work moves through what he has called “field poetry,” a practice attentive to language as sound, movement, and material presence. His books include Smashup, Wrack Lariat, From a Manifold Path, and James Joyce Is Not a Verb. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and he has long been associated with experimental and innovative poetry. Dawn Raffel Dawn Raffel is a writer, editor, and teacher whose books include Boundless as the Sky, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, The Secret Life of Objects, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, and Carrying the Body. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, Open City, and numerous other publications. She has also taught creative writing at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, and elsewhere. Terese Svoboda Terese Svoboda is the author of twenty-four books of poetry and prose, including novels, memoirs, short fiction, biography, and translation. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Pushcart Prize, among numerous other honors. Her work extends across literature, translation, opera, and video. Edwin Torres Edwin Torres is a bilingual, New York–based poet and self-described “lingualisualist,” whose work is rooted in the languages of sight and sound. His poetry combines language with vocal and physical improvisation, sound, and performance. He is the author of numerous books, including feel recordings in the evershift, Ameriscopia, One Night: Poems for the Sleepy, and Yes Thing No Thing, and has performed his work internationally. In-Person Registration: Please use form below to register for in-person attendance. 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