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As part of Momtaza Mehri’s Words Go Round tour in Singapore, Sing Lit Station has put together an evening of poetry that explores new ways of belonging and (un)belonging, becoming and (un)becoming. Joined by poets Pooja Nansi and Cyril Wong, we invite all guests to sit down and relax as we listen to them share poems old and new, about places lost and found.
The event begins at 8pm; door opens at 7.45pm. We hope to end by 9.30pm, although our poets have been instructed to take their time. An informal book signing session will follow the reading.
There will be a $5 door charge. All proceeds will go to our artists and our cat, who has broken many things in the office recently. All guests will be treated to warm tea and sweet, sweet vibes.
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DETAILS
Price: $5 at the door
Date: 25 Feb 2019 (Mon)
Time: 7.45pm till late
Venue: Sing Lit Station (22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506)
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NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE: We have a cat. Guests with allergies are to take note of this.
Momtaza Mehri is a British-Somali poet, essayist and editor, and is the current Young People’s Laureate for London. Her work has been featured in Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, BBC Radio 4, Vogue and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. She is a Complete Works Fellow, and winner of the 2017 Out-Spoken Page Poetry Prize and the 2018 Brunel African Poetry Prize.
Her chapbook sugah.lump.prayer was published as part of the New Generation African Poets series. Her poems also feature in Ten: Poets of the New Generation, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2017. Momtaza Mehri's participation is made possible with the assistance of Words Go Round, an outreach programme of Singapore Writers Festival. (Photo credit: Lee Townsend, for Spread the Word)
Pooja Nansi's work has been described as "unflinching, lyrical and quietly honest". She is the author of two collections of poetry, Stiletto Scars and Love is An Empty Barstool. Her key performance work includes her one-woman show, You Are Here which explores issues of migration through personal family histories. She also wrote and performed Thick Beats for Good Girls with Checkpoint Theatre which opened in April 2018 and explored the intersections between feminism, identity and Hip Hop.
She was a recipient of the Young Artist Award in 2016, co-founder of Other Tongues, a literary festival of minority voices, and is the current festival director of the Singapore Writers Festival.
Cyril Wong is a dark balloon afloat between dank places, and sometimes leaks poems and little fictions into the atmosphere. (Photo credit: The Mindful Company)
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Nabilah Said’s play, ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native, had a sold-out run at the 2019 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. With its lens trained on an adopted woman’s decision to join a national singing competition, the play mashes timelines, characters and genre, and challenges authenticity and historicity to paint a picture of the Malay minority experience in Singapore.
At the heart of NEW PATHS / NEW WORKS is a conversation between the playwright Nabilah Said and the theatre critic Corrie Tan. Together, the two will discuss how Nabilah’s newest works use experimentations in form and narrative to explore the intersections of gender, race and religion, and the dislocations and relocations of personal and geographic histories. ANGKAT, alongside two other plays by Nabilah Said, will also be presented in a series of dramatic readings interspersed across the duration of the event.
The event begins at 8.15pm; door opens at 8pm. We hope to end by 9.30pm, although truth be told it might end at 10pm, as we will open the floor to a Q&A session. Although the event is free admission, we encourage guests to bring donations, which will go to the lovely people involved. Guests might hear John Coltrane’s Giant Steps playing in the background.
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DETAILS
Price: Free admission
Date: 20 Mar 2019
Time: 8pm till late
Venue: Sing Lit Station (22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506)
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NOTE ABOUT SPONSOR: This event is powered by the National Youth Council’s Young ChangeMakers Grant.
NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE: We have a cat. Guests with allergies or phobias are to take note of this.
Nabilah Said is a playwright whose work has been presented in Singapore and London by theatre companies Teater Ekamatra, The Necessary Stage and Bhumi Collective. Recent work include ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native and yesterday it rained salt, which were both presented at M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2019. She is the co-founder of international theatre collective Lazy Native, under which she presented Inside Voices in London in 2019. In 2016 she founded Main Tulis Group, Singapore’s first collective of playwrights writing in Malay and English. Formerly an arts correspondent with The Straits Times, Nabilah is a theatre critic and arts writer and is currently a writer-in-residence at Sing Lit Station. She holds an M.A. in Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. nabilahsaid.com. (Credit: Erfendi Dhahlan)
Corrie Tan is a writer, editor and researcher based in Singapore. She is into radical shifts in performance criticism – redefining the critic as dramaturg, collaborator, archivist, ethnographer and shapeshifter. Corrie is resident critic and contributing editor at Arts Equator, where she co-convenes a critics' reading group and a performance criticism mentorship programme. She has also written regularly about performance for The Guardian, The Stage, Exeunt Magazine and The Straits Times. She is currently a doctoral student in Theatre Studies on the joint PhD programme between the National University of Singapore and King's College London. (Credit: Elizabeth Chan)
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Six years. That’s a damn long time. After six years of writing speculative fiction, JY Yang finally finds themselves at the end of the critically acclaimed and bestselling Tensorate series, with the fourth and final volume, The Ascent to Godhood, out in July this year.
As a postcolonial feminist writer who deals specifically with gender, cultural imperialism and structures of power in their work, JY Yang is currently embarking on the epic journey of crafting their first novel-length work of fiction. Described as a far-future space opera centred on the descendants of a doomed generation ship, it has giant robots, space stations under siege, emperors and hierophants, holy artifacts and faster-than-light travel. It is Joan of Arc meets Gundam. It sounds nothing short of amazing.
NEW TERRAIN / NEW WORKS will feature JY Yang delivering a lecture on world-building as they understand it – a process which no doubt presents newer and more unique challenges to any writer dealing with speculative storytelling. An informal book-signing session will then follow the lecture.
The lecture begins at 5pm; door opens at 4.45pm. We will be charging guests $5 / entry at the door. Guests are strongly encouraged to bring their copies of the Tensorate novellas. They will also be treated to lots of tea, cat nuzzling and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async, for those suffering from chronic SIFA-related FOMO.
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DETAILS
Price:$5 / entry
Date: 13 Apr 2019
Time: 4.45pm–6pm
Venue: Sing Lit Station (22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506)
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NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE: We have a cat. Guests with allergies or phobias are to take note of this.
JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters and The Ascent to Godhood, available in 2019). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, Lambda Literary and World Fantasy Awards, while their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons.
JY is queer, non-binary, and lives in Singapore. Find them online at http://jyyang.com, or on Twitter: @halleluyang.
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“The function of the muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.”
“Free your mind / the rest will follow.”
This is something you won’t want to miss. Three poets — each with their own unique poetics — gather together for a powerhouse series of performances and presentations in the May edition of NEW WORKS.
NEW TONGUES / NEW WORKS will feature visiting writer / musician Luka Lesson alongside poets Marylyn Tan and Hamid Roslan, in a showcase revelling in new poems, new sounds, new limits. New ways of speaking, and listening, and feeling. Partake in poems as you’ve never read or heard them before.
The event begins at 7.30pm; door opens at 7pm. There will be a Q&A session after the presentations, as well as book sales / signings with Luka Lesson and Ethos Books. We will be charging guests $5 / entry at the door to pay our speakers and feed our cat.
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DETAILS
Price: $5 / entry
Date: 4 May 2019
Time: 7pm–9.30pm
Venue: Sing Lit Station (22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506)
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NOTE ABOUT BOOK SALES: Cash only, please! And bring your own bags to save the Earth.
NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE: We have a cat. Guests with allergies or phobias are to take note of this.
Luka Lesson is an Australian-born poet and rap artist of Greek heritage. Luka’s work engages with the mythology of his family’s homeland, the fiercely political and the vulnerably introspective. An author of two independently published collections, as well as two full-length recorded albums, Luka has had work commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, poems published in a number of international anthologies, and toured with the likes of Dr Cornell West (USA), Nahko & Medicine for the People (USA), Akala (UK) & Shane Koyczan (Canada).
Luka runs his own poetry retreat on the Greek island of Rhodes every year (www.rhodespoetryretreat.com) and has always used education programs as a form of activism and social change in schools and universities worldwide. His poem “May Your Pen Grace The Page” will appear on Australian English curriculums from 2019 onwards.
Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, linguistics graduate, poet, and artist, who has been performing spoken word since 2014. She is invested in building community, emancipating the marginalised, and the alienated, endangered body. Her first volume of poetry, GAZE BACK (published by Ethos Books; finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award), is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Marylyn has been published in various anthologies, including A Luxury We Must Afford, Inheritance, and ASINGBOL Anthology. She writes for your bewilderment.
Follow her on Facebook (Mrylyn Tn), on her website (mrylyn.wordpress.com) or take pleasure in her visual art (instagr.am/masqueerades).
Hamid Roslan is a poet based in Singapore. His work may be found in The Volta, Asymptote and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others. His debut poetry collection, parsetreeforestfire, is forthcoming from Ethos Books. Pre-orders will be made available at the event.
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Rachel Heng and Ng Yi-Sheng are two writers with unbridled imaginations. From the ever-evolving coastlines reshaped by land reclamation and rising sea levels, to criminal hantus and precolonial Singapore, their wide-ranging preoccupations are sure to take their readers out of space, and out of time.
NEW ERAS / NEW WORKS will feature writers Rachel Heng and Ng Yi-Sheng in conversation with Patricia Karunungan, as the three engage in important questions about the nature of time and temporality in the ongoing development of literature in Singapore.
The event begins at 5.30pm; door opens at 5pm. There will be a Q&A session after the presentations — guests are encouraged to bring copies of the authors’ books to have them signed. Entry will be $5 at the door, and will go towards paying our speakers and feeding our cat.
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DETAILS
Price: $5 / entry
Date: 29 Jun 2019
Time: 5.30pm–7pm
Venue: Sing Lit Station (22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506)
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NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE: We have a cat. Guests with allergies or phobias are to take note of this.
NOTE ABOUT RACHEL HENG’S MASTERCLASS: If you would like to see more of Rachel Heng during the day, do consider signing up for her masterclass in plot at Sing Lit Station on 29 Jun, 2pm.
Rachel Heng is the author of Suicide Club (Henry Holt, 2018), which was featured as a best summer read by outlets such as The Irish Times, The Independent, ELLE, Gizmodo, NYLON, Bustle, Bitch Media and will be translated in ten languages worldwide. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and Prairie Schooner's Jane Geske Award, and has been published in Glimmer Train, Tin House, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Her non-fiction has been published in outlets such as The Telegraph, Grazia, Lit Hub and The Rumpus. Rachel is currently a James A. Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.
Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, fictionist, playwright, researcher and activist. His books include the speculative fiction collection Lion City, the best-selling non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, and the poetry collections last boy (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize), Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience and A Book of Hims. Additionally, he has translated Wong Yoon Wah’s The New Village and co-edited national and regional anthologies such as GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose, Eastern Heathens, and Heat.
He is currently a PhD student at NTU. He tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.
Patricia Karunungan is a graduate student at Nanyang Technological University. Her research concerns contemporary Southeast Asian novels, particularly how postmodernist strategies of narration negotiate relationships between past and present. She co-edited the anti-realist fiction anthology this is how you walk on the moon. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in publications like LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, SG Poems 2017-2018, Get Lucky: An Anthology of Philippine and Singapore Writings and The Undergraduate Library.
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In recent years, journalism in Singapore has found itself adopting newer moulds and bolder formats — with stronger, sturdier convictions. NEW ANGLES is particularly interested in seeing how new, alternative journalism might persist and press on in Singapore.
The final edition of NEW WORKS will feature writers Kirsten Han of New Naratif, Grace Yeoh of Rice Media, and Ruby Thiagarajan of Mynah Magazine, each speaking on the roles they play in their respective publications, as well as their hopes and dreams for the future.
The event begins at 5pm; door opens at 4.30pm. There will be a Q&A session after the presentations. Prior registration will be required ($15 / person), and ticket-holders will be prioritised over walk-ins; all money earned will go towards paying our speakers and feeding our cat. We’ll serve lots of tea.
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DETAILS
Price: $15 / entry (via singlitstation.com/shop/newangles or the button below)
Date: 20 Jul 2019 (Sat)
Time: 5pm—7pm
Venue: Sing Lit Station (22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506)
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NOTE ABOUT THE VENUE: We have a cat. Guests with allergies or phobias are to take note of this.
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean freelance journalist and Editor-in-Chief of New Naratif, a platform for Southeast Asian journalism, research, art and community-building. Her work often revolves around the themes of social justice, human rights, politics and democracy, with bylines in publications like The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Asia Times.
In 2018, she received an Honourable Mention from the World Justice Project’s Anthony Lewis Prize for Exceptional Rule of Law Journalism. Her essay, "The Silhouette of Oppression", was published by Epigram Books in 2019. Kirsten is also a founding member of We Believe in Second Chances, a group advocating for the abolition of the death penalty in Singapore.
Grace Yeoh is presently the Current Affairs Editor at Rice Media.
Ruby Thiagarajan is the editor-in-chief and a founder of Mynah Magazine. She is a recent graduate of Brown University’s Public Humanities graduate programme.