Artists Space

This reading series is being held in conjunction with a gallery exhibition, video series and film programs investigating the mythology of the American family and the machinations of the nuclear family. Organized by Connie Butler and Micki McGee. January 17 - March 2, 1991.

Laurie Carlos is a writer, poet, mover and actor born and raised in New York City. She is the author of Organdy Falsetto, White Chocolate, and Monkey Dances, a member of Thought Music, and works frequently with The Urban Bush Women, most recently as a featured performer in Praise House. As a black performance artists, Ms. Carlos has been recreating the stories and lives of black Americans as they have not been dealt with in a theatrical vernacular since the minstrel show. Her text uses American English, backwater dialects and urban cadences, tongue twisters in both Hispanic and Sephardic codes. She has received grants and fellowships from NYFA, NYSCA and the NEA, and is an OBIE and BESSIE award winner. "My voice is the voice of one standing on line."

Mark Richard was bon on an Air Force Base in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His parents are both of French Creole descent, and he grew up in Texas and Virginia. Because of his voice, which deepened at an early age, Mr. Richard became, at age 13, the youngest radio announcer in the United States with his own radio show. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, Grand Street, Antaeus, and The Quarterly, and his recent collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World (Knopf) received the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. In 1990 also, Mr. Richard received the Whiting Foundation Writer's Award and an NEA fellowship.

John Weir, the son of an animal talent agent and a television executive, was born in Tarrytown, New York, and raised in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where he lived with junkyards, soda jerks, corn fields and filing stations. His novel, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (Harper & Row), won the 1989 Lamda Rising Literary Award for "Best Gay Man's Debut" and is currently available in paperback, through Harper Perennial. In January, he received a grant from the NEA.

Reframing the Family Readings Press Release

The Reading Series has been funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.