Twenty Summers

Mali Obomsawin Magdalena Abrego Antonija Subat Charles (Chuck) Roldan Mali Obomsawin is an award winning songwriter, bassist and composer from Odanak First Nation. With an eclectic background in indie rock, American roots/folk and jazz, Obomsawin carries several music traditions. A Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist, Mali has toured internationally, receiving acclaim from NPR and RollingStone and several Boston Music Awards nominations with her band Lula Wiles. Obomsawin frequents the folk/roots circuit as a frontwoman and sidewoman, appearing several times at Newport and Philly Folk festival, and also performs as bassist/singer in the creative music scene with Peter Apfelbaum, Taylor Ho Bynum and with her Sextet project, Sweet Tooth. Known for her striking, sardonic lyricism and sonic dreamscapes, Mali's songwriting delivers the lush, anti-imperialist rock show we've all been craving. IG & Twitter: @featherbitchxx Facebook: facebook.com/maliobomsawin

In Pending Memories, Adrian Fernandez combines photographic media, three-dimensional installation, digital art and elements of architecture and engineering software to achieve images that challenge the viewer's perception by proposing a new imaginary reality. The viewer is called to consider the motives that led to the existence of each construction, reframing a fabricated past to dream of a utopian future. Adrian Fernandez studied visual arts at the San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy (2004) and later at the Superior Institute of Arts (2010) in Havana. From 2010 to 2012, he trained at The Ludwig Foundation of Cuba and New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Special Programs, where he also taught. He has exhibited extensively, from Berlin to New York, Houston to Antwerp, including ongoing representation at Provincetown's Schoolhouse Gallery. "From a conceptual point of view, I believe this work connects with my perception of the Cuban reality and the crisis this country has lived with for such a long time. The current paradigm crisis, from a social and ideological point of view, drives the creation of these photographs. The accumulation of similar images reveals a reality that shows structures in disuse, abandoned within the idleness of a depleted territory. The ‘photographed' constructions function as metaphors for the inert remains of a society sustained by the spectral foundation of memory. The residues of the epic past and the current precariousness of the current moment appear as ruins of the fiction that we still have to live with today. " —Adrián Fernández Milanés

Sharon Mashihi works in the mediums of audio, film, and performance. In 2018, Sharon won the Third Coast International Audio Prize Silver Award for her audio documentary, Man Choubam (I Am Good.) In 2020, she released the metafictional audio series, Appearances, in which she performed as 36 distinct characters. Described by New York Magazine as "a breakthrough for the podcast form", Appearances named a best podcast of the year by The New York Times, Vulture, Indiewire, The L.A. Review of Books, and others. Sharon is a former editor of the podcasts,The Heart and Bodies.

Devin N. Morris is a Baltimore born, Brooklyn based artist who is interested in abstracting American life and subverting traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings, photographs, writings and video. His works prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes and elaborate draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on male interactions, platonic and otherwise. The use of gestural kindnesses between real and imagined characters are inspired by his various experiences growing as a black boy in Baltimore, MD and his later experiences navigating the world as a black queer man. Memory subconsciously roots itself in the use of familiar household materials & fabrics, while symbolically he arranges it. Looking to buoy his new realities in a permanent real space, Morris posits his reimagined societies as a prehistory to futures that are impossible to imagine. Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and host of the culture podcast "Still Processing." A graduate of the University of Virginia, she worked at Wired before joining the Times in 2008 and more recently, the New York Times Magazine. Wortham is an important voice on digital culture and new technologies, and is a co-author of “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew, coming out via One World 2020.

Cynthia Nixon is an actress, activist and theatre director best known for her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City. In 2018 she ran for Governor of New York on a platform focused on income inequality, renewable energy, establishing universal health care, stopping mass incarceration in the United States, and protecting undocumented children from deportation. Nixon is also an advocate for LGBT rights and received the Yale University Artist for Equality award in 2013 and a Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2018. V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a Tony Award-winning playwright, activist, performer, and author of the Obie award-winning international theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries, and was recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years. She is the author of many plays and books including her critically acclaimed memoir, In the Body of the World, best-seller The Apology, now available in almost 20 languages, and soon to be released Reckoning by Bloomsbury in 2023. She is the founder of V-Day, the almost 25 year old global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), gender diverse people, girls and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of City of Joy. Kara Swisher is an American journalist. She is an opinion writer for The New York Times, a contributing editor at New York, the host of the podcast Sway, and the co-host of the podcast Pivot.

Through a series of exercises, Twenty Summers Fellow Brenda Zhang (Bz) guides participants in visual and spatial documentation of their individual experiences and narratives of Place, while exploring the shared meanings of “home” and “elsewhere.” Participants are invited to bring cartographic tools from their own traditions, diasporas, or fictions. Brenda Zhang (Bz) is a visual artist, designer, organizer, and educator based on unceded Tongva land (so-called Los Angeles). They are a core organizer with the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter University and a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES. In their practice, they investigate physical and cultural construction as entangled processes and use disciplinary tools of art and architecture to imagine futures beyond settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. Bz received a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University. In their free time, they look for birds and trash in the Los Angeles River.

As the Supreme Court was pondering whether to overturn Roe v. Wade early June 2022, journalist Joshua Prager discussed his recent book The Family Roe with activist and feminist scholar Dr. Felicia Kornbluh. Their conversation explores the history of abortion, the unknown lives at the heart of Roe, and the current state of reproductive rights in America. Dr. Felicia Kornbluh is a writer, activist, and professor who specializes in the histories of feminism, gender, social welfare, and reproductive politics. She is Professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Vermont and the author or coauthor of three books, including the forthcoming A WOMAN'S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice. For more than twenty years, Joshua Prager, a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, has written about historical secrets—revealing all from the hidden scheme that led to baseball's most famous moment (Bobby Thomson's “Shot Heard Round the World”) to the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (a photographer he tracked down in Iran). He is also the author of The Echoing Green (a Washington Post Best Book of the Year) and 100 Years, a collaboration with Milton Glaser, the graphic designer who created the I ❤️ NY logo. Joshua has written for the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Hebrew University, and has spoken at venues including TED and Google. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.

Washington, D.C. has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick's Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. James Kirchick is joined by fellow writer Andrew Sullivan to explore how the secret “too loathsome to mention”, since FDR has shaped each successive presidential administration, impacting everything from the creation of America's earliest civilian intelligence agency to the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the struggle for African American civil rights, and the conservative movement. “Scrupulously researched and novelistic in style, Secret City is an extraordinary achievement... Not since Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.” —George Stephanopoulos James Kirchick is an award-winning journalist and author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. A visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, he has reported from over 40 countries and is a columnist for Tablet magazine. Kirchick has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung among many other publications, and lives in Washington, D.C. Andrew Sullivan is one of today's most provocative social and political commentators. A former editor of The New Republic, he was the founding editor of The Daily Dish, and has been a regular writer for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, New York magazine, The Sunday Times (London), and now The Weekly Dish. He lives in Washington, DC, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (Ayutla Mixe, 1981) is a member of COLMIX, a collective of young Mixe people who carry out research and dissemination activities on Mixe language, history and culture. She studied Hispanic Language and Literature and completed a Master's degree in Linguistics at UNAM. She has collaborated in various projects on the dissemination of linguistic diversity, development of grammatical content for educational materials in indigenous languages, and documentation projects and attention to languages at risk of disappearing. She has been involved in the development of written material in Mixe and in the creation of Mixe-speaking readers and other indigenous languages. She has been involved in activism for the defense of the linguistic rights of indigenous language speakers, in the use of indigenous languages in the virtual world and in literary translation. She has also been involved in processes in defense of the environment.

Twenty Summers Presents Fran Lebowitz in Conversation with Brian Vines at the historic Hawthorne Barn in Provincetown, Massachusetts, June 12, 2021.

Bosq, Producer, DJ & Multi-instrumentalist, has been exploring the intersections of Afro-Latin music with Disco, Funk, Reggae, House and Hip Hop for years. Since 2013 and the release of his first album, his musicianship and craft have matured without losing any of the passion or imagination with which he approaches every project. His pursuit for collaborating authentically rather than simply appropriating musical styles from afar brought him first to Puerto Rico, where over a two week stay he recorded the entire Bosq y La Candela All-Stars - San Jose 51 in Old San Juan with legendary musicians like Tempo Alomar and Roberto Roena. Now, with 5 full original albums and countless remixes and singles under his belt (for labels as diverse and legendary as Ubiquity, Fania, Defected, Soul Clap and more), he creates and resides full time in Medellín, Colombia, one of the worlds most legendary musical melting pots. Bosq's music has seen consistent play from the likes of Gilles Peterson & Craig Charles on the BBC, KCRW, RinseFM & other legendary radio stations, while Dj's like Kerri Chandler, Poolside, Yuksek, Palms Trax, Soul Clap, & GUTS give his tunes constant rotation in clubs and at festivals. Tours have taken Bosq across North & South America, Europe, and Asia, to clubs and festivals like Rakastella (Miami), OYA (Oslo), Boomtown Fair (UK) and many more. He has shared stages with the likes of Joe Claussel, Bobbito, J Rocc & Tony Touch to name a few. His music has been featured in films and television such as The Catch, You're The Worst, Broad City, and more.

Mozelle Andrulot grew up in Eastham and attended Lesley University where she studied Liberal Arts. Her career has taken her to New York City and London where she performed at the SoHo House in both cities. Here on the Cape, she's performed at Mahony's, Tin Pan Alley, The Muse and regularly with Zoë Lewis's Bootleggers show in Provincetown. She has graced the stage with local notable jazz artists Bruce Abbot, Fred Fried, Fred Boyle and John Thomas. This local jazz jewel, along with Doug Ricardi's Jazz till Dawn, entertains audiences from Wellfleet's Preservation Hall to the Yarmouth Cultural Center. This summer she will be singing outdoors regularly at the Fox and Crow. MikeMRF is a performing artist, recording artist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. His latest album Mob Music 2 hit #39 on the iTunes R&B Albums Chart and was featured on Apple Music. Album opener, "Tip Jar" landed in the Semi-Finals of the 2020 International Songwriting Competition and was featured in the Amazon Prime Show "30 The Series" along with two other songs. Mike is also a Lennon Award winner in the 2017 John Lennon Songwriting Contest for his original song "Mob Music", the title-track off of his iTunes Chart-Topping sophomore album. In 2014, Mike won 2 OUTmusic Awards (with 5 nominations, the most that year) including the highly coveted Humanitarian Songwriter of the Year for his song "Be Strong (LGBT Youth)". "Be Strong" was selected as Boston Pride's Flag-Raising Anthem. Mike holds a Bachelor's of Music in Jazz Saxophone & Music Education from Berklee College of Music, as well as a Master's of Music in Music Theory & Composition from New York University where he currently teaches Songwriting and Composition as an Adjunct Professor. Mike has performed with Ada Vox, Matt Alber, Esera Tuaolo, Ruth Pointer (Pointer Sisters), Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spaulding, Varla Jean Merman and many more. He performs and music-directs various shows in Provincetown, MA.

Luna was a New York band formed in 1991 by singer/guitarist Dean Wareham after the breakup of Galaxie 500. The band made seven studio albums before disbanding in 2005. After a ten-year break, they reunited and toured in 2015, and in 2017 released a new LP — A Sentimental Education and an EP of instrumentals — A Place of Greater Safety. Other recent reissues include a deluxe 2xLP version of their classic Penthouse album (on Rhino) and another 2xLP set Lunafied that collects all the covers the band recorded in the 1990s. Now scattered around the country (Los Angeles, New York and Austin) the band retains the same lineup that operated from 1999 to 2005: Dean Wareham on vocals/guitar, his wife Britta Phillips on bass, Sean Eden on guitar, and Lee Wall on drums.

Bosq, Producer, DJ & Multi-instrumentalist, has been exploring the intersections of Afro-Latin music with Disco, Funk, Reggae, House and Hip Hop for years. Since 2013 and the release of his first album, his musicianship and craft have matured without losing any of the passion or imagination with which he approaches every project. His pursuit for collaborating authentically rather than simply appropriating musical styles from afar brought him first to Puerto Rico, where over a two week stay he recorded the entire Bosq y La Candela All-Stars - San Jose 51 in Old San Juan with legendary musicians like Tempo Alomar and Roberto Roena. Now, with 5 full original albums and countless remixes and singles under his belt (for labels as diverse and legendary as Ubiquity, Fania, Defected, Soul Clap and more), he creates and resides full time in Medellín, Colombia, one of the worlds most legendary musical melting pots. Bosq's music has seen consistent play from the likes of Gilles Peterson & Craig Charles on the BBC, KCRW, RinseFM & other legendary radio stations, while Dj's like Kerri Chandler, Poolside, Yuksek, Palms Trax, Soul Clap, & GUTS give his tunes constant rotation in clubs and at festivals. Tours have taken Bosq across North & South America, Europe, and Asia, to clubs and festivals like Rakastella (Miami), OYA (Oslo), Boomtown Fair (UK) and many more. He has shared stages with the likes of Joe Claussel, Bobbito, J Rocc & Tony Touch to name a few. His music has been featured in films and television such as The Catch, You're The Worst, Broad City, and more.

Twenty Summers presents Mal Blum LIVE at Truro Vineyards of Cape Cod, Truro, MA, August 14, 2021 -- Mal Blum, once dubbed “punk's greatest hidden treasure” by Stereogum, cleverly crafted songs that are are as self-effacing as they are viscerally relatable. In 2019 they released their latest full length, Pity Boy (Don Giovanni), an album that explores boundary setting and self-sabotage, and an exemplification of Mal's ability to interrogate the human condition with lyrical ingenuity. Following that, they released a 7", Nobody Waits b/w San Cristóbal, with Saddle Creek Records' Document Series in 2020.

Twenty Summers presents Mozelle & Mike Flanagan (featuring Cliff Lechy) LIVE at Truro Vineyards of Cape Cod, Truro, MA, July 16, 2021 – Part 1 of 2 Mozelle Andrulot grew up in Eastham and attended Lesley University where she studied Liberal Arts. Her career has taken her to New York City and London where she performed at the SoHo House in both cities. Here on the Cape, she's performed at Mahony's, Tin Pan Alley, The Muse and regularly with Zoë Lewis's Bootleggers show in Provincetown. She has graced the stage with local notable jazz artists Bruce Abbot, Fred Fried, Fred Boyle and John Thomas. This local jazz jewel, along with Doug Ricardi's Jazz till Dawn, entertains audiences from Wellfleet's Preservation Hall to the Yarmouth Cultural Center. This summer she will be singing outdoors regularly at the Fox and Crow. MikeMRF is a performing artist, recording artist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. His latest album Mob Music 2 hit #39 on the iTunes R&B Albums Chart and was featured on Apple Music. Album opener, "Tip Jar" landed in the Semi-Finals of the 2020 International Songwriting Competition and was featured in the Amazon Prime Show "30 The Series" along with two other songs. Mike is also a Lennon Award winner in the 2017 John Lennon Songwriting Contest for his original song "Mob Music", the title-track off of his iTunes Chart-Topping sophomore album. In 2014, Mike won 2 OUTmusic Awards (with 5 nominations, the most that year) including the highly coveted Humanitarian Songwriter of the Year for his song "Be Strong (LGBT Youth)". "Be Strong" was selected as Boston Pride's Flag-Raising Anthem. Mike holds a Bachelor's of Music in Jazz Saxophone & Music Education from Berklee College of Music, as well as a Master's of Music in Music Theory & Composition from New York University where he currently teaches Songwriting and Composition as an Adjunct Professor. Mike has performed with Ada Vox, Matt Alber, Esera Tuaolo, Ruth Pointer (Pointer Sisters), Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spaulding, Varla Jean Merman and many more. He performs and music-directs various shows in Provincetown, MA. --- Twenty Summers is an incubator for art and ideas. It imagines a more equitable and sustainable future, twenty summers from today. The organization was founded in Provincetown's historic Hawthorne Barn, and we honor its legacy of artistic freedom by providing resources, residencies, and a platform for original projects and innovative ideas. We believe that, in the right context, creative minds can find solutions to our hardest problems. https://www.20summers.org

Brian Vines is a Chicagoan by birth and a New Yorker by choice. After completing the Masters Program in Broadcast Journalism at Boston University's College of Communication he fetched coffee for some of the most respected journalists and news figures in the world during his tenure at CNN. After a stint in political communications Brian fell in love with his own reflection and reported for here! networks, NYC-TV, Brooklyn Independent Media, the internationally syndicated VJIAM show, and Broad Band Network3 among others. In addition to reporting, show running and producing Brian is also a skilled host and moderator of live events on topics ranging from contemporary memoir to police brutality. A dedicated cyclist, NPR subscriber, and podcast enthusiast, Brian can be spotted balling-on-a-budget, fighting the urge to binge watch and answering questions about his hair.

Interviewer: Brian Vines Maynard Monrow was born in Hollywood, California and currently lives in New York City. Monrow received his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions and galleries including: The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, FL; Gavlak Gallery LA and Palm Beach; Booth Gallery, New York, NY; Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY and ACME Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2005). He has staged international performances in Rome, Italy, and participated in numerous projects including Ruffian's Spring 2016 Ready-to-Wear Collection and LAX Art's L.A.P.D. Billboard Project.

Shaina Feinberg is a writer/director from New York City. Her book Every Body – a candid look at sex from every angle – came out in January 2021 from Little, Brown. Her bi-weekly column in The New York Times, "Scratch" is an illustrated look at the world of business. Shaina is also a filmmaker who specializes in micro-budget filmmaking. In 2019, she was named by Indiewire as 1 of 25 queer filmmakers to watch. She has directed two original series for Audible: Aliens of Extraordinary Ability, starring Maeve Higgins and Cristela Alonzo, and Phreaks, starring Christian Slater, Carrie Coon and Justice Smith. She is a visiting professor at the Vermont College of Fine Art in the MFA program for film. She lives in Brooklyn.

Chanel Thervil is a Haitian American artist and educator that uses varying combinations of abstraction and portraiture to convene communal dialogue around culture, social issues, and existential questions. At the core of her practice lies a desire to empower and inspire tenderness and healing among communities of color through the arts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Pace University and a Master's Degree in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She's been making a splash in Boston via her educational collaborations, public art, and residencies with institutions like The Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Children's Museum, The DeCordova Museum, The Harvard Ed Portal, and The Cambridge Public Library. Her work has been featured by PBS Kids, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Bay State Banner, WBUR's ARTery, WGBH, and Hyperallergic.

Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and author of ‘The Perseverance' and 'All The Names Given' both being published in the US this year by Tin House. His first children's picturebook 'Can Bears Ski?' illustrated by Polly Dunbar is published by Candlewick Press. His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Lit Hub, POETRY Magazine among others. His accolades include a Ted Hughes Award, Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, the Rathbone Folio Prize and he was awarded an MBE for his contribution to English language literature. He is currently based in Oklahoma City.

Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a design director at MASS Design Group and a Ford-Mellon Disability Futures fellow, whose work explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, and power. Jeffrey is a recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and a John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his work on Architecture of Deafness, which explores how Deaf schools and other Deaf Spaces emerged as sites of cultural resistance. Jeffrey holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB in Architecture from Princeton University. Deaf since birth, Jeffrey is a Yonsei, or fourth-generation, Japanese American, and attended a deaf school in Massachusetts, where his earliest intuitions about the relationship between aesthetics, geography, and power emerged. Interpreting services provided by codabrothers.com

Join author Claudia Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas for a screening of and Q&A about the latest in their Situations series.

Poets Jaswinder Bolina and Victoria Chang virtually gathered to discuss their latest books — Jaswinder’s first essay collection Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020) and Victoria’s 2020 National Book Award longlisted Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) — as well as artistic influences and a new generation of poetry.Jaswinder Bolina is an American writer. His first collection of essays Of Color was published by McSweeney’s in June 2020. His most recent collection of poetry The 44th of July was released by Omnidawn in April 2019. It’s been named a finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award and was long-listed for the 2019 PEN America Open Book Award. His previous collections include Phantom Camera (winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry from New Issues Press), Carrier Wave (winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry from the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University), and the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly 2014). An international edition of Phantom Camera is available from Hachette India. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and been included in The Best American Poetry series. His essays can be found at The Poetry Foundation, McSweeney’s, Himal Southasian, The Writer, and other magazines. They have also appeared in anthologies including the 14th edition of The Norton Reader (W.W. Norton & Company 2016), Language: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2013), and Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press 2011). He teaches on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.Victoria Chang’s new book of poetry, Obit , was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Other poetry books are Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. She also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Katherine Min MacDowell Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and other awards. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry. Her children’s picture book Is Mommy? (Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster), was illustrated by Marla Frazee and was named a NYT Notable Book.  Her middle grade verse novel, Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing in 2020. She is a contributing editor of the literary journal, Copper Nickel and a poetry editor at Tupelo Quarterly, as well as a contributing editor for On the Seawall. She is the Program Chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA Program, as well as co-coordinates the Idyllwild Writers Week. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and her wiener dogs, Mustard and Ketchup.

Twenty Summers was thrilled to host our first joint-residency with director and photographer Dawit N.M. & writer and photographer Gioncarlo Valentine earlier this October, and to hear them talk about the residency experience, projects they have (and have attempted) to collaborate on, and other projects they have worked on during COVID-19.Dawit N.M. is a director and photographer currently based in New York. Born in 1996 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he later moved to Hampton Roads, Virginia, with his family at the age of six. After establishing a deep interest in the visual arts, he became an ardent autodidact, committing himself fully to learning the art of filmmaking and later photography. His subjects have taken audiences into worlds of loss, devotion, intimacy, and innocence. In the same vein, the images question the transparency of narratives that are shaped by western influences. This relationship between identity and stereotypes inspired his first self-published photography book, Don’t Make Me Look Like The Kids On TV (2018).  Dawit’s directorial debut—a visual accompaniment for Ethiopian-American singer/songwriter Mereba's debut album entitled The Jungle Is The Only Way Out (2019)—earned him a nod for Emerging Director at the 2019 American Black Film Festival. Dawit’s first exhibition, The Eye That Follows (2020), is currently on view at The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA, through August 16th, 2020.Gioncarlo Valentine (b. 1990) is an award winning American photographer and writer. Valentine hails from Baltimore City and attended Towson University, in Maryland. Backed by his seven years of social work experience, his work focuses on issues faced by marginalized populations, most often focusing his lens on the experiences of Black/LGBTQIA+ communities.Gioncarlo was a member of the 2018 class of Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2019 he opened his debut solo exhibition, The Soft Fence, at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon. He has had his work collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and has been commissioned by Wall Street Journal Magazine, Propublica, The New Yorker, Esquire, Vogue, and Newsweek among many others. 

Authors Diane Cook and Lydia Kiesling join the first-ever Twenty Summers virtual festival to talk about their recent novels, The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) and The Golden State (Picador, 2019), respectively, both of which examine motherhood, the state of the world, and glimpses at even darker futures in unique, funny, and sometimes devastating ways. Diane Cook is the author of the novel, The New Wilderness, currently nominated for a Booker Prize, and the story collection, Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and her stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life, and was the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, daughter and son.Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a contributing editor at The Millions and her writing has appeared at outlets including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, The Cut, and The Guardian.

Visual artist and podcaster Elise Peterson talks with author Shayla Lawson about her recent book, This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls & Being Dope, as well as their first Prince concerts, Mariah Carey, Frank Ocean, American Dolls, toxic masculinity, cancel culture, Black girl magic, and so much more.Shayla Lawson is the author of This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls & Being Dope (Harper Perennial, 2020) and three poetry collections: I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018), A Speed Education in Human Being (Sawyer House, 2013) and Pantone. She has written for Tin House, PAPER, ESPN, Salon,  Guernica, Vulture and New York Magazine, but she mostly writes for you. A MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colony Fellow, Shayla Lawson curates The Tenderness Project with Ross Gay and writes poems with Chet’la Sebree (pronounced Shayla, no relation). She was raised in Lexington, Kentucky, is a professor at Amherst College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.Elise R. Peterson is a multimedia storyteller with a focus in visual arts, community building and writing currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Writing clips have appeared in Believer Magazine, Adult, PAPER MAGAZINE, ELLE, LENNY LETTER, and NERVE among others. Her multidisciplinary visual work is informed by the past, reimagined in the framework of the evolving notions of technology, intimacy and cross-generational narratives. Socially, it is her aim to continue to use art as a platform for social justice while making art accessible for all through exhibitions of public work and beyond. She has illustrated two children's books: How Mamas Love Their Babies, Feminist Press, and The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gasket, Dottir Press. Elise hosted MANE, a online video series highlighting the intersection of culture and hair as told through the narratives of women via Now This News. She also founded and co-hosts Cool Moms: a bi-weekly podcast highlighting women who make their passions a priority. Elise continues to illuminate marginalized narratives through a limitless practice in storytelling.

Twenty Summers was thrilled to welcome author & journalist Jenna Wortham in residence at the Hawthorne Barn this past September, and to host a virtual conversation with photographer Naima Green. Naima Green’s exhibit Brief & Drenching is on view at Fotografiksa until February 2021, and Jenna Wortham’s Black Futures, co-edited by Kimberly Drew, will be published by Penguin Random House in December 2020.For more virtual arts programming please visit https://www.20summers.org Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and host of the culture podcast "Still Processing." A graduate of the University of Virginia, she worked at Wired before joining the Times in 2008 and more recently, the New York Times Magazine. Wortham is an important voice on digital culture and new technologies, and is a co-author of “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew, coming out via One World 2020.Jenna Wortham on her current project:  I am working on a collection of linked essays that treat finding the body as a neo-noir thriller as an entry point, and then broadens out into a larger concentric series of inquiries and investigations about how the modern black female queer body functions in space and time. The body is a container for the self, and a vessel for experiences. My book seeks answers to the questions: What does it mean to participate in a body? To unmake and make one while inside one? My book is an investigation on the formation of identity, a blueprint for how to keep it, especially in our newly digitized lives. It’s about discovering the thrill of architecting desire outside of patriarchy, living in blackness and the freedom of exploring life beyond any earth-bound paradigm. I think about this work as a ritual, an unlearning, an unbecoming as a means to unfold. An exorcism in reverse. A repossession. It is a story about identity, and body consciousness, the liminal space between our masculine and feminine sides, digital homogeneity, intimacy and lust.Naima Green is an artist and educator currently living between Brooklyn, NY and Mexico City, Mexico. She holds an MFA in Photography from ICP–Bard, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA from Barnard College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, International Center of Photography, Houston Center for Photography, Bronx Museum, BRIC, ltd los angeles, Gallery 102, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, Shoot the Lobster, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Arsenal Gallery. Green has been an artist-in-residence at Recess, Mass MoCA, Pocoapoco, Bronx Museum, Vermont Studio Center, and is a recipient of the Myers Art Prize at Columbia University.Her works are in the collections of MoMA Library, the International Center of Photography Library, Decker Library at MICA, National Gallery of Art, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Barnard College Library.Share 

Alaya Dawn Johnson joins Twenty Summers’ first virtual arts festival from Mexico, where she’ll take us on a walk up a path from the village she now calls home, as well as answer questions about her latest novel, Trouble the Saints  (Tor Books, 2020).FROM THE PUBLISHER:“Juju assassins, alternate history, a gritty New York crime story...in a word: awesome.” —N.K. Jemisin, New York Times bestselling author of The Fifth SeasonThe dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in Alaya Dawn Johnson's timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin falls in love and tries to change her fate at the dawn of World War II.Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens.Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything—not just her own past, and Dev, the man she loved, but even her own dreams.Still, the ghosts from her past are always by her side—and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she keeps in her heart. And so Phyllis will have to make a harrowing choice, before it’s too late—is there ever enough blood in the world to wash clean generations of injustice?Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel—a magical love story, a compelling exposure of racial fault lines—and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.AUTHOR BIO:Alaya Dawn Johnson is an award-winning author of speculative fiction for adults and young adults. Her most recent novel, Trouble the Saints, is out from Tor as of July 2020. Her short story collection, Reconstruction, is forthcoming from Small Beer Press in November of 2020. She publishes a monthly newsletter via TinyLetter, which you can subscribe to here. It features writing advice, observations of life and eating in Mexico, and, of course, the latest news of her publications.

Francesca Ekwuyasi joins Twenty Summers for our first virtual arts programming to read from her recently released novel Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), an intergenerational saga about three Nigerian women: a novel about food, family, and forgiveness. FROM THE PUBLISHER:Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.Francesca Ekwuyasi's debut novel tells the interwoven stories of twin sisters, Kehinde and Taiye, and their mother, Kambirinachi. Kambirinachi feels she was born an Ogbanje, a spirit that plagues families with misfortune by dying in childhood to cause its mother misery. She believes that she has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family and now lives in fear of the consequences of that decision.Some of Kambirinachi's worst fears come true when her daughter, Kehinde, experiences a devasting childhood trauma that causes the family to fracture in seemingly irreversible ways. As soon as she's of age, Kehinde moves away and cuts contact with her twin sister and mother. Alone in Montreal, she struggles to find ways to heal while building a life of her own. Meanwhile, Taiye, plagued by guilt for what happened to her sister, flees to London and attempts to numb the loss of the relationship with her twin through reckless hedonism.Now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos to visit their mother. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.AUTHOR BIO:Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging. Francesca's writing has been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and GUTS magazine. Her story Ọrun is Heaven was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize. Her forthcoming debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread will be available October 2020 through Arsenal Pulp Press. Supported through the National Film Board's Film Maker's Assistance Program and the Fabienne Colas Foundation, Francesca's short documentary Black + Belonging has screened in festivals Halifax, Toronto, and Montreal.

Immunologist Dr. Carl June, medical oncologist Dr. David Porter, and Loxo Oncology at Lilly CEO Dr. Josh Bilenker gathered virtually early in September to discuss Dr. Porter’s and Dr. June’s groundbreaking immunotherapy work, how work follows them home, and the course of their careers in this lively, moving discussion on what it means to care for those who are running out of hope.Dr. Carl H. June is an American immunologist and oncologist. He is currently the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He is most well known for his research into T cell therapies for the treatment of cancer. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.Dr. David Porter is the Director of Cell Therapy and Transplantation at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been recognized by America’s Top Doctors 2007, 2008, 2010-2018, by Best Doctors in America 2009 - 2018, and Philadelphia magazine’s annual Top Docs issues, 2004 -2020. He is an expert in blood cancer, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and leukemia.Dr. Josh Bilenker received his M.D. from The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his A.B. from Princeton, awarded summa cum laude in English. Dr. Bilenker was a Medical Officer in the Office of Oncology Drug Products at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for two years. While at the FDA, he conducted clinical reviews of IND-stage and licensed biologic oncology products. Prior to joining the FDA, Dr. Bilenker trained at the University of Pennsylvania in internal medicine and medical oncology, earning board certification in these specialties. Dr. Bilenker is CEO of Loxo Oncology at Lilly, serves as a director of Gossamer Bio, and is also a Board Member of the NCCN Foundation and of BioEnterprise.  

Esteemed poets Heid E. Erdrich and Eric Gansworth join visual artist Andrea Carlson in conversation to celebrate the release of Heid E. Erdrich’s latest, Little Big Bully (Penguin Group, 2020), and Eric Gansworth’s Apple: (skin to the Core) (Levine Querido, 2020), both out on October 6th, 2020. The longtime friends talk procrastination, expectations to act as cultural informants, and much more.Interspersed throughout the discussion are readings from Little Big Bully and Apple: (skin to the Core).**Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. She has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press (2018). Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Eric Gansworth,  Sˑha-weñ na-saeˀ, (Onondaga, Eel Clan) is a writer and visual artist, born and raised at Tuscarora Nation. The author of twelve books, he has been widely published and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions. Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College, he has also been an NEH Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colgate University. Winner of a PEN Oakland Award and American Book Award, he is currently Longlisted for the National Book Award. Gansworth’s work has been also supported by the Library of Congress, the Saltonstall and Lannan Foundations, the Arne Nixon Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Seaside Institute. Andrea Carlson is a visual artist currently living in Chicago, Illinois. Through painting and drawing, Carlson cites entangled cultural narratives and institutional authority relating to objects based on the merit of possession and display. Current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the British Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson was a 2008 McKnight Fellow and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient. 

Recorded by Twenty Summers on August 18, 2020. All Rights Reserved.Authors Damon Young and Rion Amilcar Scott kick off the first-ever virtual Twenty Summers festival with an epic, sprawling conversation about barbershops, Covid’s impacted on their work, Lovecraft Country, humor in writing, I May Destroy You, Kanye West, Black success, and the perils of white validation.Damon Young is a writer, critic, humorist, satirist, and professional Black person. He's a co-founder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas—coined "the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet" by The Washington Post and later acquired The Root—and a columnist for GQ. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LitHub, Time Magazine, Slate, LongReads, Salon, The Guardian, New York Magazine, EBONY, Jezebel, and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. His debut book, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, won the Barnes & Noble Great Discovery Prize for Nonfiction (2019).Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019), a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Rumpus, among others.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on August 3, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved. 

"Meet Jeremy O. Harris: The Queer Black Savior the Theater World Needs." So read a recent headline in Out magazine; Vogue anointed him “one of the most promising playwrights of his generation." The hype is understandable. Though still in his final semester at Yale Drama School while this conversation was filmed, Harris has had two plays in production Off Broadway before runaway Broadway success with SlavePlay. Daddy, the second, stars Alan Cumming and Ronald Peet. Joining him on our very own stage to discuss his work and career was cultural critic Emily Bobrow, who observed in the Economist that Harris writes about race and sexuality "with humour, intellectual rigour, nods to pop culture and an engaging sense of spectacle," asking audiences to confront their own complicity in prejudice.Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 8, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 31, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved. 

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 15, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 15, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 17, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 7, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 7, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 26, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 25, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 25, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded by Twenty Summers on May 18, 2019. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 18, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 17, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded on May 24, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Investigative reporter Jodi Kantor and provocative political commentator Andrew Sullivan united for a tête-à-tête on the rapidly changing cultural landscape in the wake of Kantor’s momentous, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 New York Times story exposing Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged abuse toward women. That story set off a worldwide reckoning that empowered victims to come forward with the truth about men who had been abusing their power in a wide range of fields for years. Sullivan, whom we are honored to welcome for a third appearance on the Barn stage, has spoken out fearlessly as well, at times challenging the most far-reaching effects of the #MeToo movement on privacy and sexuality. We anticipate a timely and riveting conversation. Sponsored by Sharon Fay, Maxine Schaffer, Arthur Cohen and Daryl Otte

Seasoned singer-songwriter, performing artist, and author, Dar Williams, joined us for a solo concert in the Hawthorne Barn on May 26, 2018, where she shared her music from her extensive collection of folk tunes, along with stories from her many journeys and experiences.

Tony Award–winning playwright J.T. Rogers (Oslo) and seasoned foreign correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran (National Book Award finalist for Imperial Life in the Emerald City) sat together on June 9, 2018 in the Hawthorne Barn to discuss the intersection of politics, war, journalism, and art. J.T. Rogers’s plays include Oslo, Blood and Gifts, The Overwhelming, White People, and Madagascar. For Oslo he won the Tony, New York Critics, Outer Critics, Drama Desk, Drama League, Lortel, and Obie awards. As one of the playwrights for the Tricycle Theatre of London’s The Great Game: Afghanistan he was nominated for an Olivier Award. His works have been staged throughout the United States and in Germany, Canada, Australia, and Israel. He is a Guggenheim fellow and has received three NYFA fellowships in playwriting. Rogers is a member of the Dramatist Guild, where he is a founding board member of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund. He is an alum of New Dramatists and holds an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior vice president for Public Affairs at Starbucks and the executive producer of the company’s social impact media initiatives. Prior to joining Starbucks in 2015, Rajiv was a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post, where he worked for two decades. During his newspaper career, he reported from more than three dozen countries and was bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo and Southeast Asia. He also served as the Post’s national editor and as an assistant managing editor. In 2014, he and Howard Schultz wrote the bestselling book, "For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism and Sacrifice." He also is the author of two other bestselling books: "Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan" and "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2007 by The New York Times and inspired the movie Green Zone. He is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of Stanford University.