art by Nancy Sayavong
Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our November literary mixtape, curated by Danielle Bero and Sage Curtis and featuring art by Nancy Sayavong. You can read the full text here. Videos are embedded in the text, but you can also watch them here.
Submissions are open for our next mixtape, to be held on Feb 1, 2021 and curated by Tom Pyun and Mary Ann Thomas. We’re accepting all forms of writing and all themes through Jan 6. All selected authors will be paid and published in sPARKLE & bLINK 109.
You may have noticed February is kind of a while from now. We do have a show between now and then! Save Mon, Jan 4 for the premiere of our new quarterly series featuring writers of color, created in collaboration with Michael Warr (who will be hosting the first event). More info TBA soon.
About the curators
Tom Pyun (he/him/his) is a writer and nonprofit worker living in San Francisco. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Anthology award. Tom has completed fellowships at Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and Tin House. His short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Rumpus and Joyland and placed in competitions such as The Blue Mesa Review‘s Summer Story Contest. Tom has degrees from Vassar and Columbia and an MFA from Antioch University-Los Angeles.
Mary Ann Thomas (they/she) is the queer brown daughter of Indian immigrant parents, a travel nurse, bike tourist, and writer. They have bicycled over 10,000 miles: in 2014, she bicycled from San Diego to Montreal; in 2017, she biked across India from the Himalayas to Kerala, the state at the tip of the subcontinent where her family is from. Their writing has been featured in literary and travel platforms, such as The Rumpus, On She Goes, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and She Explores. They are working on a travel memoir about bicycling across her homeland towards sobriety and queerness.
Michael Warr‘s books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmet Till to Trayvon Martin, (W.W. Norton), and from Tia Chucha Press The Armageddon of Funk, and We Are All The Black Boy. He is the recipient of the 2020 Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award and is a San Francisco Library Laureate. Other honors include a Creative Work Fund Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and is a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Follow his creative work at https://michaelwarr-creativework.tumblr.com/. For copies of Michael Warr’s books, order here.