Panel Gallery
From underground presses to DIY community staples to full-color dives exploring mixtapes, manga, or feminism, zines have been a vehicle for self-expression, resistance, and connection. This panel will explore their evolution, creative spirit, and the ways curators, in text and image, continue to publish these singular works of art.
After the discussion, panelists will move to the Zine Zone, the Fest’s pop-up art space, to create. Zine makers from across the state will enter the Zone to sell their work and guide visitors in making their own unique zines.
Usually, when writers discuss “poetic justice,” they are referring to the deserved retribution a character experiences for her actions. This panel takes the concept of poetic justice in a new direction by considering how contemporary poetry represents, complicates, exemplifies, or questions justice in the real world. We will have a wide-ranging conversation about how poetry and justice come together in writing about motherhood and families; military experience and PTSD; Shakespeare, the poetic literary tradition, and representations of racial difference.
Through the lens of fiction, this reading will explore how immigrants struggle to belong in the United States. Among the questions and topics will be: What is it to become accepted in this country as someone who belongs? What are the values that immigrants bring to the U.S. which reflect the foundational values of this country? How do immigrants also change the political and cultural and even racial nature of who is seen as a citizen?
Four Cultural Visionaries on the Art and Commerce of Creating and Curating Art In Connecticut
Creating and producing art is never easy—and today we find ourselves at a new crossroads as funding shrinks and culture wars intensify. Yet artists continue to dream big, sharing stories that highlight our shared humanity and our capacity to connect.
Writer Javier Garcia del Moral recently observed in Lit Hub, that arts can “restore presence in an age of absence, cultivate listening in a time of noise, celebrate curiosity when cynicism seems easier, and invite us to inhabit a community of attention.”
This wide-ranging discussion brings together cultural visionaries to reflect on the state of Connecticut’s arts scene across disciplines—and to explore what we can all do to build a society we want to live in.