Jessica Lee & Mark Strickland Jazz Duo: Fusion Street
Join us for another riveting concert with City of Asylum fan-favorites Jessica Lee & Mark Strickland. Jessica and Mark have played and recorded for years as a Jazz Duo both regionally and nationally. This concert celebrates their new project Fusion Street, a performance (and recording) project that explores songs from a wide variety of genres performed with […]
Join us for a reading with National Poetry Series winner sam sax who will be reading from his collection Madness. In this powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations […]
Join us for a family-friendly afternoon of storytelling with Lyn Ford. Lyn Ford is a fourth-generation storyteller who shares the gifts and heritage of orature from her Affrilachian family. Lyn is a nationally recognized raconteur and workshop presenter, an award-winning writer, a Thurber House mentor to young authors, a teaching artist with the Ohio Alliance for […]
Join us for an evening of jazz with Triple Double celebrating their album’s vinyl release. “Drummer Tomas Fujiwara works with rhythm as a pliable substance, solid but ever shifting. His style is forward-driving but rarely blunt or aggressive, and never random. He has a way of spreading out the center of a pulse while […]
Sembène Film Festival: Five Fingers for Marseilles (South Africa)
Join us for a screening of Five Fingers for Marseilles presented by Sembène–The Film & Art Festival. (This film will be presented in Sesotho with English subtitles.) Twenty years after fleeing from the brutal police aggression in colonial Marseilles, a member of the Five Fingers returns seeking peace, but with the town under new threat, he must reluctantly fight to […]
Join us for a concert featuring the powerhouse jazz talents of Eric DeFade, Paul Thompson and Thomas Wendt playing the music from Sonny Rollins’ classic album, Way Out West. Sonny Rollins’ 1957 album Way Out West introduced the technique he called “strolling”, in which he would solo over only bass and drums, without a pianist (the pianist is on a permanent “stroll”). This intimate, pared-down […]
Join us for a reading with author Amitava Kumar who will be presenting his newest book Immigrant, Montana. This event is co-sponsored by CMU’s Literary and Cultural Studies Colloquium & The Humanities Festival. The author of the widely praised Lunch with a Bigot now gives us a remarkable novel–reminiscent of Teju Cole, W. G. Sebald, John Berger–about a young new […]
Join us for a reading with John Corbett downstairs in our intimate Word Cellar. Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism […]
Join us for a screening and Q&A discussion of the newly released political documentary What Is Democracy?, presented as part of the CMU Humanities Festival. (Run time: 107 minutes) Coming at a moment of profound political and social crisis, What Is Democracy? reflects on a word we too often take for granted. Director Astra Taylor’s idiosyncratic, philosophical journey […]
Sembène Film Festival: Burkinabè Rising (Burkina Faso)
Join us for a screening of Burkinabè Rising presented by Sembène–The Film & Art Festival. (This film will be presented in French, English & Moore.) Burkinabè Rising, a new documentary from Cultures of Resistance Films, showcases creative nonviolent resistance in Burkina Faso. A small, landlocked country in West Africa, Burkina Faso is home to a vibrant […]