November 20th
7pm
The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog.
Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang’s singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith.
"Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun is a patchwork epic of feral girlhood, faithful to the subterranean dignity of its materials—dreams, zines, and Tumblr posts. Jackie Wang has written a book I've been waiting my whole life to read." -Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
"Jackie Wang is dissolute. She refuses the word "work" so her writing is full of location and devoid of it, continuing I guess what was really ripe in the '70s about what a sentence is and what "my" mind is doing today. It's not all lost territory but Alien Daughters, most of all, is just profoundly beautiful, hellish new writing. I feel fucking lucky to have this suitcase of Jackie's, these pets of hers, deflating and surging, bobbing & rocking here right now. Something glorious. What can it be?" -Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and assistant professor of American studies & ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she researches race, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021, National Book Award Finalist). Her current book project, The Carceral Laboratory: The Rise of High-Tech Prisons and Police, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of The Light Room (Riverhead) and Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar (Columbia University Press). Heroines is being reissued by Semiotext(e) in spring 2024.
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