"from the hip"

December 13, 2003, 7:00 p.m.
AND Gallery
525 Selby Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55102

featuring:

Terry Davis MFA Faculty at Minnesota State University,

Desdamona, Minnesota Music Award for Best Spoken Word

Sha Cage, distinguished multi-disciplinary artist

Christine Stark, writer, visual artist, speaker, MFA student

Terry Davis is a writer and a teacher of narrative writing born in Spokane, Washington, in 1946.  Davis attended public school, Eastern Washington State College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford as a Stegner Fellow.  He's taught in high school, in a number of universities including East Carolina, and he's been a member of the MFA faculty at Minnesota State University, Mankato, for the past twenty years.

Davis has published narrative and exposition in an unlikely diversity of magazines, such as Sports Illustrated, English Journal, Redbook, and the Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction.  His novels are Vision Quest, Mysterious Ways, and If Rock and Roll Were a Machine, each recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press.  He's also written a critical biography of his old friend, the beloved young-adult writer Chris Crutcher.

Vision Quest, the Warner Bros. movie of his first novel, still runs weekly on some cable channel eighteen years after its release.


Desdamona has been performing in the Twin Cities since 1997. She currently hosts two open mics on Mondays and Tuesdays at The Blue Nile Restaurant. She is a teacher, curator, and host of the quarterly performance event and workshop series "The  Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Evolution. Desdamona has appeared on "Jenny Jones" as a featured performer and recently received her second Minnesota Music Award for Best Spoken Word Artist.


Shá Cage is a Multi-Disciplinary artist and community organizer who works within the mediums of theater, film, dance, painting and play-writing. She is Development Director of Trú Rúts Endeavors and The Minnesota Spoken Word Association (MNSWA) as well as Managing and Co-Artistic Director of women of color theatre collective, MaMa mOsAiC.  Over the past few years, she has received several grants, commissions, residencies, and awards and has produced works locally and nationally including the recent spoken word and hip hop play, The Evidence of Silence Broken.  She is the recipient of a 2002 Jerome Many Voices Residency administered by the Playwright's Center, a distinguished 2003 Forecast Public Art Works Grant to celebrate women's histories, a 2003/04 Jerome Literature grant administered by Sase: The Write Place, and a recent 2003/04 Pangea Bridges residency. She recently had a seed of her play; Famous Amos, commissioned in Eye of the Storm Theater's Seed the Storm Festival.


Christine Stark is a writer, visual artist, community organizer, and speaker. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, magazines and journals, including The Florida Review, Poetry Motel, Poetry Midwest, Journal of Trauma, and Contemporary Women's Issues. She is the winner of the 2002 Jonis Agee Award in Fiction and placed in the 2002 National American Pen Women contest. She has spoken nationally and internationally and her
artwork has been displayed across the country. Currently, she teaches writing at Minnesota State University, where she is working toward an MFA in Writing.