☼ gatherings ☼
Throughout the year, we host study groups, poetry readings, performances, and other gatherings around New York City. Join the mailing list for info on upcoming events, or write to us if you want to collaborate!
libraries for the commons
April 7, 2024 Index Space
Libraries for the Commons is a free, one-day gathering and celebration of local, mutual aid book & knowledge-sharing collectives. We invite anyone interested in learning about library projects in their own communities and knowledge sharing as a tool for resistance, sustenance, and abolitionist world building more broadly. Come engage in conversations, workshops, and performances and leave the gathering with free and low-cost books, chapbooks, zines and other printed materials.
Join us by getting a sliding-scale ticket here! All ticket donations will go toward the cost of the event and groups who’ve made our gathering possible.
Participating groups include Wendy’s Subway, The Free Black Women’s Library, Interference Archive, Prison Library Support Network, Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, and the Pilipinx American Library, and Brooklyn Book Bodega among others.
tender musings
February 18, 2023
Herbert Von King Park, Brooklyn
We’re excited to share our first event of the new year, a belated v-day gathering, on Feb. 18! Come play with our library of collected love poems, essays, texts, & other materials, & stay for our open meeting to learn more about Library of Study, meet our collective members, & see what we have planned for the next few months.
weekend of study: rehearsal
July 30-31, 2022
Prospect Park, Brooklyn
This July, we gathered in Prospect Park for the first Weekend of Study on the theme of rehearsal. Across two days, facilitators hosted workshops, study groups, readings, and performances; we’re so grateful to them for their offerings and to everyone who participated and made this weekend possible. You can read more about the program here.
Rehearsal is a site where projects can be made, unmade, and remade—it asks us to see missed steps and mistakes as generative prompts. It is a space that supports cycles of repetition and the routine of learning through failure. Rehearsal encourages forms of imagining and spontaneous meaning-making deemed untenable elsewhere; it is where the speculative lives. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition is life in rehearsal;” thus, our rehearsal is part of a process of making new worlds possible. Our rehearsal asks us to consider the imperfect draft, the unfinished piece, the mistake-prone work as the performance we’re all invited to partake in.
What does it look like to rehearse for revolution? What spaces will we need to create to hold our rehearsals? How is the classroom a site of rehearsal? What would it mean to honor the rehearsal as the performance itself? What sites of rehearsal exist already in our everyday lives as glimpses of imagined futures?
everyday // ceremony
May 22, 2022
Prospect Park, Brooklyn
This spring, we assembled a library based on the theme of "everyday // ceremony." We invited participants to suggest a text (a book, song, poem, film, recipe, etc.) for this library. We gathered everyone’s materials and invite all who attend to share something about their contributions.
poetry reading + library
Sept 22, 2020
Prospect Park
We hosted a free poetry library during the afternoon, followed by an evening hillside reading with poets Sara Deniz Akant, Farnoosh Fathi, and Adrienne Raphel