The Flow Chart Foundation partners with other organizations as well as directly producing programming toward fulfilling its mission. Events are announced through our Mailing List, as well as through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and through local listings and partner organizations. All virtual programs are presented with live close-captioning. Details about and documentation of past events from this year can be found below, and for prior years here.
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Close Readings in a Virtual Space
Favorite poets leading participatory group thinking-and-reading-through workshops of single poems
Installations & Exhibits
Exhibits in the Flow Chart Space and public poetry installations
Readings and Performances
Poetry, music, and other performance events
Discussions & Gatherings
Panel discussions, presentations, moderated conversations, and other such events
Auctions & Galas
Fundraising events
CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE
CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE is a free, participatory virtual series (taking place via Zoom) features some of our favorite poets leading intimate, virtual group reading-thinking-and-reading-through workshops, usually on single, “challenging” poems. The poets—neither explicitly teaching nor explaining—serve as expert tour-guides for us to explore each featured poem as a group. Whether already well-versed in the “close reading” of poems or having never been quite sure you’ve been "getting it," CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE provides a friendly gathering space for us to take a refreshing deep dive into poetry. Each event lasts about an hour and concludes with a brief reading by our special guest poet.
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Elizabeth Willis
On Thursday, March 6th, 2025, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge led a thinking-and-reading-through of “I Didn't Invent the World” by Elizabeth Willis, followed by a short reading of her own work.
Born in Beijing, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry including Hello, the Roses, Empathy, I Love Artists and A Treatise on Stars, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts. She received the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 2020.
Samiya Bashir leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Carl Phillips
On Thursday, February 20th, 2025, Samiya Bashir led a thinking-and-reading-through of “Rubicon” by Carl Phillips, followed by a short reading of her own work.
Samiya Bashir is a multi-media poet, writer, librettist, and artist whose solo and collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, exhibited, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Bashir lives in Harlem, NYC.
Eugene Ostashevsky leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Lyn Hejinian
On Thursday, February 6th, 2025, Eugene Ostashevsky led a thinking-and-reading-through of “The Unfollowing: 7” by Lyn Hejinian, followed by a short reading of his own work
EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is a poet and translator whose writing has been described as “translingual” because of its focus on multilingualism and linguistic interference. HisThe Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet, NYRB Poets, 2022) examines the effect of speaking a nonnative language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots.As a translator, Ostashevsky is best known for his editions of the Russian avant-garde, such as OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006). His more recent translations include Lucky Breaks by the Ukrainian fiction writer Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions, 2022).His work has appeared in Best American Poetry(US) andThe Forward Book of Poetry(UK), and won the National Translation Award (US), the City of Münster International Poetry Prize (DE), the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD fellowship (DE), and other prizes.
Omar Berrada leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Henry Dumas
On Thursday, January 23rd, 2025, Omar Berrada led a thinking-and-reading-through of “The Zebra Goes Wild Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Henry Dumas, followed by a short reading of his own work
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (Obultra, 2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (Kulte, 2016); La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (Kulte, 2020); and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (Litmus, 2024). His writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature (UC Press, 2012), and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry (Texas UP, 2020). He grew up in Casablanca and currently lives in New York
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Elisa Gabbert leads a thinking-and-reading through of John Berryman
On Thursday, January 9th, 2024, Elisa Gabbert led a thinking-and-reading-through of “Dream Song 29” by John Berryman, followed by a short reading of their own work
Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self (published in June 2024 by FSG). Her other books include Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory, and The Word Pretty. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the Believer, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.
Installations & Exhibitions
Flow Chart Space
The Flow Chart Space (348 Warren Street, Hudson, NY) features artwork at play with language, writing, and reading—more information on exhibitions can be found here.
Bowlahoola: A Performance in a Conditional Mood
Saturday, May 31st, Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, May 31st, 2025, Kate Kremer performed Bowlahoola, which unfolds as a sequence of five monologues in the conditional tense, at The Flow Chart Space.
Bowlahoola asks what could happen, what might have happened, what we wish would happen: these hypotheticals emerge from and chafe against the harrowing conditions we’re living in.
Travestying the legal tool of the hypo, crisscrossing five centuries and five continents, taking up questions of abortion, privacy, white feminism, preemptive warfare, climate catastrophe, and the carceral state, Bowlahoola weaves and tangles what ifs until it becomes impossible to anchor any speaker in a particular identity. Instead, the monologues—performed by longtime collaborators Kate Kremer and Bryce Payne—become portraits of the ways we privilege hypothetical over actual lives, and the real devastations that result.
This version of Bowlahoola, specially created for The Flow Chart Foundation ran about an hour and twenty minutes.
Bowlahoola was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Kate Kremer (Left) is a playwright and publisher. Frequently using archives as sites for addressing the ways that our ethics, feelings, and intimacies are conditioned by the systems that we live and love within, her work has been described by Mac Wellman as “way ahead of the curve.” Kate’s plays have been produced at JACK in Brooklyn, the Figge Art Museum, the Public Theater (Weasel Festival), Dixon Place, SFX Fest, the Motor Company, the Wild Project, Brooklyn College, and Stagefemmes. Charlatans was selected for the Bushwick Starr Reading Series and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. She’s been a finalist for the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Award, shortlisted for the Tom LaFarge Award and the Leslie Scalapino Award, and received an honorable mention for the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers. An excerpt from Kate’s long-form solo performance The Intimacy—which premiered at the Flow Chart Foundation last year—is forthcoming in Fence, Issue 42. Kate is the editor of the experimental play publishing organization 53rd State Press and currently teaches playwriting at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
Bryce Payne (Right) has spent the majority of хуг adult life making performing/performance art in New York City. Xyr work has been formed by a lifetime of connections made on stages, sidewalks, dancefloors, web applications, and subway cars. Xe hopes to maintain xyr humanity in a web of structures designed to exhaust or pervert xem; xe hopes to encourage your efforts to do the same. Insta: @the.nice.bryce
Readings & Performances
Stink Horn: a mycological musical performance-lecture by Siôn Parkinson
Friday, May 9th, Flow Chart Space
On Friday, May 9, 2025, the John Cage Trust, in collaboration with The Flow Chart Foundation, presented Artist, musician, and author Siôn Parkinson in an intimate performance-lecture—part talk, part live musical experiment—exploring the strange, multisensory world of the stinkhorn fungus.
Drawing from his book Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen (Sternberg Press), Siôn lead an evening of music and mycology. Like composer John Cage, his twin passions for music and mushrooms have shaped a radical approach to sound. Yet while Cage sought silence in his fungal forays, Siôn finds Stink⎯an element that links sound and smell, the real and the hallucinated, opening up new ways of listening and composing.
Siôn’s performance was accompanied by a recording of John Cage’s "Child of Tree" (1975), a work for amplified plant materials, performed by D’Arcy Philip Gray (2014) and presented courtesy of Mode Records.
Dr Siôn Parkinson is an artist, musician, performer, and author investigating our sensory relationship with the more-than-human world. He is a research fellow at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, where he is investigating the olfactory heritage of fungi—mushroom odors that hold cultural or historical significance due to their associations with particular places, objects, and traditions. Insta: @sionparkinson
SLEEPERS AWAKE: Oli Hazzard & Emily Skillings
Saturday, February 8th, Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, February 9th, 2025, on the occasion of the publication of his collection, SLEEPERS AWAKE (FSG), Oli Hazzard was joined by Emily Skillings for a poetry reading and discussion at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY.
Oli Hazzard is the author of three books of poems, including Sleepers Awake (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021). He lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of St Andrews.
Emily Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia.
Discussions & Gatherings
Kenneth Koch Centennial: A Gathering
Saturday, May 17th, Flow Chart Space
On the occasion of 100 years since his birth, The Flow Chart Foundation presented daylong Gathering celebrating the legacy of Kenneth Koch featuring talks, readings, screenings, and short performances.
Guest speakers included: Andrew Epstein, Anthony Atlas, David Lehman, Dorothea Lasky, Emily Setina, Jordan Davis, Mitch Sisskind, and Susannah Hollister.
Performers & playwrights included: Corinne Donly, Diane Exavier, Jess Barbagallo, Ry Cook, Erin Courtney, Zach Savich, Karinne Keithley Syers, Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair, Lucas Baisch, Nazareth Hassan, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.
Special thanks to the Koch Estate.
For more information and to watch videos from the day click HERE!
Below are the programs and bios for all the artists/scholars involved.
Bios