Shayla Lawson & Elise Peterson in Conversation

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.

Jenna Wortham & Naima Green in Conversation

Twenty Summers was thrilled to welcome author & journalist Jenna Wortham in residence at the Hawthorne Barn in September 2020, 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.

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.

Alaya Dawn Johnson Trouble the Saints Discussion

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 Season
The 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 reads from Butter Honey Pig Bread

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.

Healthcare Panel with Doctors Carl June, David Porter & Josh Bilenker

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.

Heid Erdrich, Andrea Carlson & Eric Gansworth in Conversation

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), as well as footage from Andrea’s latest exhibit, Red Exit.

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.

Damon Young & Rion Amilcar Scott in Conversation

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 impact 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.

James Lecesne - The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey

James Lecesne joined Twenty Summers onstage back in 2014 for the first-ever read through of his phenomenal show The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey.

Courtney Marie Andrews in Concert (Solo)

One of the brightest rising stars in music today is singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews, a powerful vocalist whom critics have compared with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Her latest album, May Your Kindness Remain, was one of Rolling Stone’s 25 Best Country and American Albums of 2018; on tour this spring, she shared the stage with John Prine, Patty Griffin, and Deer Tick—but we had her all to ourselves.

Season Six Trailer

Take a sneak peek at the upcoming video releases for Season Six at the historic Hawthorne barn in Provincetown, MA. Courtesy of Twenty Summers. All rights reserved.

Adia Victoria in Concert

Blues singer-songwriter and performer Adia Victoria dropped into Provincetown for a stripped-down performance as she toured the world to promote her new, critically acclaimed album, Silences, which she recorded with Aaron Dessner of The National. Throughout the album's twelve tracks, which are making “the blues dangerous again” (New York Times), Victoria addresses the topics of mental illness, drug addiction, sexism, and other challenges that consume the day-to-day lives of women attempting to make a world of their own.

Jeremy O. Harris and Emily Bobrow in Conversation

"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.

Eric Kandel and Emily Braun in Conversation

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum hosted an afternoon conversation that brought together Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel with Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor of 20th Century European and American Art at Hunter College. The two experts discussed Kandel’s most recent books, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science and The Age of Insight, in which he examines how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning.

Jodi Kantor and Andrew Sullivan in Conversation (Full)

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

J Mascis in Concert

Best known as the frontman of the influential indie rock trio Dinosaur Jr., J Mascis has also been a solo artist, producer, and film composer. Dinosaur Jr. was founded in 1984 and became one of the most highly regarded groups in alternative rock. By reintroducing volume and attack in his songs, Mascis shed the strict limitations of early 1980s hardcore, becoming an influence on the burgeoning grunge movement. He continues to inspire a generation of guitar players and songwriters today. He treated us to an intimate solo acoustic performance, sharing tunes from his widely acclaimed 2018 solo album Elastic Days.

Luluc in Concert

Luluc comprises multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer Steve Hassett and songwriter and vocalist Zoe Randall. The New York–based Australian duo recently released their third album, Sculptor. While masterful in its minimalism, the album is anything but quiet in impact. Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney says, “It's music that once you hear it, you can't live without it." In naming their 2014 album, Passerby, his album of the year, NPR's Bob Boilen wrote, "I've listened to this record... more than any other this year. These songs feel like they've always been."

Mountain Man in Concert

We were delighted to present the intimate harmonies of Mountain Man, which comprises three devoted friends—Amelia Meath, Molly Erin Sarlé and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig—who in 2018 released their highly anticipated second album, Magic Ship, a magnetic fourteen-song reflection on the joys, follies, and oddities of existence. In the eight years since Mountain Man’s debut Made the Harbor, the trio took an unintentional hiatus. Amelia Meath created the electro-pop band Sylvan Esso with Nick Sanborn. Molly Sarlé headed for a Zen center along the California coast. And Sauser-Monnig returned to Minnesota, then decamped to a farm in the North Carolina mountains.

William Tyler in Concert

William Tyler has been hailed as one of Nashville’s greatest electric guitarists, but on his brand-new album, Goes West, he returns to the purity of acoustic guitar, backed by a band that includes guitarists Meg Duffy and Bill Frisell, bassist and producer Brad Cook, keyboardist James Wallace, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, and engineer Tucker Martine.

Rebecca Makkai and Christopher Castellani in Conversation

Authors Rebecca Makkai and Christopher Castellani discussed their latest novels, both capturing pivotal historical moments in gay history. Makkai’s The Great Believers, listed by the New York Times as one of the Best 10 Books of 2018, is about friendship and redemption in 1980s Chicago, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and in contemporary Paris. Castellani’s Leading Men, a historical novel inspired by the romance between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, is set in 1950s Italy and modern-day New York and Provincetown. Dwight Garner of the New York Times declared it a “blazing” success, “an alert, serious, sweeping novel. To hold it in your hands is like holding . . . a front-row opera ticket.”

Alex Kotlowitz and Adam Moss in Conversation

In his most recent book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, acclaimed journalist Alex Kotlowitz once again takes up the subject of youth, poverty, and gun violence in urban America that he explored so powerfully in There Are No Children Here. Joining him at the Hawthorne barn discuss his work and the issues it tackles was Adam Moss, whose fifteen years of innovative work as editor-in-chief of New York Magazine made it the must-read that it is today.