Sparkle Taffy invites you to join us in celebrating the arrival of the month of April with an afternoon of performances of language and sound. The event is the third in an ongoing series titled Markings, created to commemorate meaningful occurrences and dates. April, the first full month of Spring in the Northern hemisphere, continues a period of lengthening days and brings the opening of flowers and leaves. We look forward to sharing this beginning with you and the growth that follows it.

Rina Goldfield (she/her) presents What the Bookworm Reads, an artist book that traces the words eaten by (actual) bookworms and gathers them into found poetry. Rina is an artist, book maker, and teacher based in New Haven, CT.

Maya Perry (she/her) highlights how moments of intimacy and vulnerability can open us to memories of cruelty and violence. Perry also wishes to speak on the Neurodivergent perspective within her practice. She is an artist, musician and teacher based in New Haven.

Rina and Maya are excited to share a collaborative performance of What the Bookworm Reads at Sparkle Taffy.

Africanus Okokon is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Haven, Connecticut working primarily with moving image, performance, painting, assemblage, collage, and sound.

Christian Schlegel is the author of the poetry collection HONEST JAMES (The Song Cave, 2015). He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a doctorate in English from Harvard, teaches English and creative writing at Pierrepont School in Connecticut, and lives in New Haven.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017) and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2021). She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.

Please consider a suggested sliding scale donation between $5 and $20 to help support our programs. All proceeds from donations go directly to the visiting performers.