Please join us for a reading to celebrate Steffani Jemison’s experimental novel, A Rock, A River, A Street. Moving deftly across narrative genres and styles as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality, and the limits of performance, Jemison’s book follows a young Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not-so-distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class, and tries to heal her body, she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her; in the process, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Jemison’s writing asks, Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between yourself and others?

Steffani Jemison is an artist in Brooklyn, New York. Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at JOAN Los Angeles, Greene Naftali, Mass MoCA, Jeu de Paume, CAPC Bordeaux, the Museum of Modern Art, LAXART, and other venues. Her work has been included in significant generational exhibitions, including Greater New York 2021 and the Whitney Biennial 2019. Her work is part of many permanent public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, Kadist, and the Stedelijk Museum. Jemison is the author of A Rock, A River, A Street (Primary Information, 2022). Her publishing project, Future Plan and Program, published books by Harold Mendez, Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jina Valentine, and Szu-Han Ho. With Quincy Flowers, she co-founded at Louis Place, a platform for writers.

A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022.