The Rally Reading Series (Brooklyn, NY) welcomes Wei Tchou, Dena Igusti, and Sarah Wang taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, May 2nd!
Come see this terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series.
Wei Tchou's essays and reporting can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Oxford American, among other publications. She likes to write about food, nature, and the complications of identity. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and has an MFA from Hunter College. She lives in New York City, where she is tending a lemon tree.
Dena Igusti is an Indonesian Muslim writer born and raised in Queens, New York. They are the author of CUT WOMAN which has been listed as a Perennial Award Winner, Harvard Bookstore Staff Pick, and Entropy Mag’s Best Of. Their work has been produced and performed at LA Times, The Brooklyn Museum, The Apollo Theater, The Public, and other venues. They are an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Open City Fellow, Best of the Net Nominee, Baldwin For The Arts Resident, and more.
Sarah Wang’s writing across genres focuses on mass incarceration, psychoanalysis, immigration, colonized bodies, feminism, class, and race. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Nonfiction Fellow, a 2021-2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, and a Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Nation, Harper's Bazaar, n+1, and McSweeney’s. She is a Tin House Scholar, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, and the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.
About the Rally Reading Series:
It’s a place where readers, writers, activists, and citizens find the stories they have in common. The Rally began as a one-time event in November 2016, one week after the election of Donald Trump. The open-mic platform promoted catharsis: a place where people of all stripes could take the stage to express their anxieties before a supportive audience.
Now, following live readings, writers engage the audience in brief conversation: listeners can ask questions, offer their own thoughts, and respond in any way that is respectful and productive. The themes and the topics addressed vary greatly from show to show, but the central mission remains the same: to provide a platform for underrepresented or disenfranchised individuals whose voices are luminous and necessary. In those stories we hope to find actionable, meaningful ways to cultivate change, and advance a stronger future for our community and democracy.
Another central tenet of our show is the “actionable” part—the readers will collectively suggest either an organization for the audience to donate to, a call to service of some sort, a recommendation for sparking debate within their community, or suggestions for how to confront prejudice/injustice.