Celebrating Necessary Alternatives: An Evening with The 3rd Thing

Join The 3rd Thing in virtual space to celebrate the emergence of this innovative press’s latest genre-bending offerings. City Lights hosts an evening of short readings, screenings and oracular activation, featuring Alissa Hattman author of Sift, Summer J. Hart author of Boomhouse, Carlos Sirah and Diane Exavier, editors of 3rd’s 100th-anniversary edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, and short films from the video lit anthology Good Symptom presented by project curator M Freeman. Also appearing will be intermedia artist, curator Rana San, and writer and arts organizer Chelsea Werner-Jatzke. The 3rd Thing’s Editor and Publisher Anne de Marcken will be conducting this event. Preorder Sift, Boomhouse, and Cane: A New Critical Edition through City Lights. Subscribe to Good Symptom through The 3rd Thing.

About the participants:

Alissa Hattman’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Gravity of the Thing, Big Other, Shirley Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University and an MA in Literature from Portland State University. Originally from North Dakota, she now lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Sift is her first book. More at www.alissahattman.com

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of Boomhouse (The 3rd Thing, 2023). Her poetry can be found in Bedfellows, Heavy Feather Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Summer is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker and educator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. Her work has been presented with The New Group, BRIC Arts, The Bushwick Starr, and more.Her book-length lyric, The Math of Saint Felix was published by The 3rd Thing in 2021. Diane lives and works in Brooklyn.

Carlos Sirah is a writer, performer, dramaturg, and cultural worker who creates formal structures rooted in Black expressions of possibility that take the shape of concert, lyric prose, procession, film, and stageplays. Sirah is the author of The High Alive: an Epic Hoodoo Diptych (The 3rd Thing, 2020).

Media artist, writer, contemplative guide and independent scholar, M Freeman works at the intersections of reckoning and resiliency, queerness and film, and contemplative, creative and social art practices. They are author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory and Contemplative Practice of Media Art (The 3rd Thing, 2020) and creator of Cinema Divina—short films made through and for guided contemplative practice. More at marilynfreeman.com

Rana San is an intermedia artist, curator, and night dreamer pondering language and lineage, intimacy and interdependence. Her film poetry and analog photography meld dreamwork, movement, and word play. She is co-founder and co-director of the annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer and arts organizer exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. She is the author of 3 chapbooks and is co-founder and co-director of the annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival.

The 3rd Thing is an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives. Every year or so they publish a cohort of projects representing in form, content and perspective our interdisciplinary, intersectional priorities. They think of each project in the cohort as a break in the stockade—a way out of the settlement and into the wilderness.

Often their books are the result of an artist working in a non-dominant discipline—a playwright writes a book of poems, a theater-maker writes a book of essays, a filmmaker writes a book of theory…. And while their emphasis is on print traditions, the projects may take any number of forms: books, broadsides, performances, installations, colloquia, video anthologies, etc.

The 3rd Thing publishes work primarily by artists and writers who identify as members of traditionally marginalized groups, primarily Indigenous people, womxn, queer people and people of color. Third Thing Press authors include Juan Alonso-Rodríguez, Anastacia-Reneé, Quenton Baker, Thione Diop, Mary Edwards, Aricka Foreman, Rell Be Free, Chantal Gibson, Elisheba Johnson, Rachel Kessler, Eli Nixon, Okanomodé, Rana San, Christina Sharpe, and Carlos Sirah, amongst others.

Visit the 3rd Thing website to learn more: https://the3rdthing.press/

This event is made possible by the support of the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/