Book Launch: Cea's BALEEN: A Poem In Twelve Days

Artist Member & Oral History Project Liaison Cea (Constantine Jones) is hosting a launch party and reading for their new chapbook, "BALEEN: A Poem In Twelve Days" at Dear Friend Books in Brooklyn on Saturday November 5th from 5-7pm. The chapbook is a collaboration between Cea and Portuguese visual artist Vicente Sampaio, whose illustrations accompany Cea's poems, and was published by Ursus Americanus Press. The event is free, open to the public, and will be held outdoors on the bookstore's back patio. Reading alongside Cea are local poets Ellie Parker, Timothy Michalik, and Zora Satchell. Books will be available for $15 each.

Cea is a Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee & housed in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Artist+ Registry at Visual AIDS, where they also work as the Oral History Project Liaison, as well as a member of the collective, What Would An HIV Doula Do? They facilitate creative writing workshops both in & outside of academia, while also volunteering at the LGBT Center Archives in New York City, where they conduct research on queer Greek-American histories as they intersect with HIV. Their work has been performed or exhibited at various venues across NYC & their debut hybrid haunted house print-document, In Still Rooms, was released on March 4th, 2020 via The Operating System. You can find them online at storiesandnoise.com.

Vicente Sampaio is a Portuguese visual artist based in Porto, Portugal, who earned an MFA in Painting in Ghent, Belgium. His practice is rooted in a deeply personal perception of urban landscapes and the visual casualties of human presence, and is informed by his/our relation to a world in which the banal can become a theater of social interconnections. He also dreams of becoming a rockstar, an actor, or a writer with little recognition living in the middle of nowhere.