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“AN EVENING WITH ESOPUS” AT P.S.1

May 1, 2006

On Thursday, May 11th, from 6-8, Esopus magazine will host its first NYC event: a group of performances by past and present contributors at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Acclaimed playwright and actor Stephen Adly Guirgis will perform a rare staged reading of one of the alternately hilarious and heart-rending “Dear Sissy” letter-monologues he has written for Esopus over the past several years.  Suji Kwock Kim will read “Generation,” the stunning poem that opens her Walt Whitman Award-winning collection Notes from the Divided Country (2003).  (The latest issue of Esopus features 22 drafts of Kim's poem printed in facsimile.)  Finally, acclaimed NY-based folksinger Ruth Gerson, whose live performances have been called “as galvanic as Bruce Springsteen’s” by Jon Pareles of The New York Times, will contribute a set which includes the public debut of her song “Kibby, Zocky Merino, and the Man with the Moustache” (which Gerson wrote for the “Imaginary Friends” CD from Esopus 4).    

New York–based folksinger Ruth Gerson has released five albums, including Very Live (1995), Fools and Kings (1997), and 2004’s Wake to Echo. She is a veteran of the Newport Folk Festival, CMJ, and SXSW, and her Living Room Concerts have generated thousands of dollars for charitable causes worldwide. Gerson recently played the female lead in the Swiss-Italian film Promised Land. 

Dubbed by The New York Times as “quite possibly the best playwright under 40,” Stephen Adly Guirgis is the author of In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, Jesus Hopped the A Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, and 2005’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which premiered at the Public Theater in a production directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. A member of the LAByrinth Theater Company, Guirgis is also an actor; he had a featured role in Todd Solondz’s film Palindromes (2005), and will appear later this year in Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. 

Suji Kwock Kim’s first published collection of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country, won the 2002 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. Composer Mayako Kubo and the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus are setting a selection of her poems to music, which will be performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus in Berlin and Tokyo in 2007. Kim, who teaches at Drew University and Sarah Lawrence College, lives in New York City. 

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