Ring in the New Year with a blank slate as the performers, storytellers, and writers of Sideshow: The Queer Literary Carnival tell you all about Tabula Rasa.
Featured in January are Regie Cabico, Casey Plett, Shawn Stewart Ruff, and Najva Sol.
Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam. He received a NY Innovation Theater Award for his work in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind & fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The DC Commission for the Arts & The Hip Hop Theater Festival. He recently performed on tour with Sister Spit & co-wrote 2 Dicks & A Diva with D’Lo & Kit Yan for Zero Capital.
Casey Plett is a graduate student in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia University and a columnist for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He has lived most of his life in the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian prairies, which has made for a decent balance, all in all. He likes night driving, fluorescently colored tights, old buildings and spicy things, in that order.
Shawn Stewart Ruff is the author of two novels—Toss and Whirl and Pass, a recent release, and Finlater—as well, the editor of Go the Way Your Blood Beats: Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African American Writers. He lives and works in New York City.
Najva Sol is a San Francisco based artist of all trades. Among her inspirations are glitter, adventure, scandal, and smut. Some of her secret powers include catching your unexpected moments on film, writing poetry, getting a roomful of people dancing, and charming the pants off of all within range. She has studied writing and photography at the New School- while gogo dancing and performing burlesque in her free time. She is currently an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts. Her writing has been published in Look Look Magazine, Release, Inprint, Periwinkle Journal, and more. Her artwork was recently featured in theSF LGBT Center (as part of the National Queer Arts Festival), Femina Potens Gallery, and the Red Poppy Art House. For fun, she co-runs an art collective in NYC called “The Lowbrow Society for the Arts” which hosts carefully curated down + dirty art parties, free swaps, and subway parades. The Lowbrow Society has been mused about in The Village Voice, NY Press, Time Out New York, Gothamist, Nerve.com, and others. Her web-presence hub is http://Najvasol.wordpress.com.