Please join us for a screening of Who Needs Sleep? by Haskell Wexler, hosted by local members of CREW (Caucus of Rank-and-File Entertainment Workers).
Union film workers will lead a post-discussion about current working issues as well as the recent film crew union IATSE contract negotiations.
Haskell Wexler was a well known cinematographer known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Conversation among many other notable films. Some of his projects dealt with social and political issues such as his Chicago-set 1969 film Medium Cool and the John Sayles film Matewan. In 2006, Wexler highlighted the issue of sleep deprivation and long work hours that many film workers experience in his documentary Who Needs Sleep?
August 3, 2024
Doors 6:30
Screening 7:00
Free and open to the public!
ACCESSIBILITY:
Masks are required. The @poboxcollective is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom. Two air purifiers are always running.
Join us for poetry every 3rd Thursday! This popular series offers in-person readings with local poets.
Thursday July 18th @ 8:00pm – *doors open at 7:30*
The August event features Chelsea Tadeyeske, Antonio Vargas-Nieto, Lewis Freeman, and Edie Roberts . Hosted by S. Yarberry.
Free and open to the public. Donations suggested!
Our events are MASKS REQUIRED. The @poboxcollective is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom. Two air purifiers are always running.
Two young American Jews travel to Israel seeking a deeper understanding of the country they were raised to love. What they encounter profoundly impacts them, leading them to join a growing movement to redefine their community’s relationship with Israel in this challenging and emotional journey.
Directed by Erin Axelman + Sam Eilertsen. Produced by Daniel Chalfen + Nadia Saah. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek Chicago. Panelists include Liz Shulman, Scout Bratt and Salome Chasnoff.
This event is free + open to the public. RSVP: https://kinema.com/events/israelism-rizgbo
Masks are required. PO Box is wheelchair accessible with an accessible bathroom and 2 air purifiers. It is located one block from the Morse stop on the Red Line.
One Million Experiments is a project exploring how we define and create safety while reducing harm in a world without police and prisons. The film remixes long-form interviews with movement workers across the world who have created community-based safety projects, expanding our ideas about what keeps us safe. We don’t need one answer to how we get free–we need one million experiments.
A facilitated discussion with the filmmakers and a representative from a highlighted project will follow.
The event is free and open to the public. Please wear a mask. The PO Box is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom and two air purifiers.
PLEASE RSVP:
For June 5: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/one-million-experiments-screening-conversation-po-box-collective-tickets-906250849687?aff=oddtdtcreator
For June 12: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/one-million-experiments-screening-conversation-po-box-collective-tickets-906252915867?aff=oddtdtcreator
BACKGROUND
As the movement for collective liberation has intensified its calls for police and prison abolition, the response has demanded that movement workers and radical imaginers offer a single solution to replace carceral responses to harm. We know that, as Mariame Kaba says, there will not be one solution – what we need, and what is already being created, are a million experiments exploring what safety, protection, and accountability can look like in different contexts and communities.
In early 2021, Project Nia and Interrupting Criminalization launched 1 Million Experiments, a virtual zine project highlighting projects, initiatives, and programs around the world that were redefining the ways communities create safety and respond to harm. From New Zealand to Oakland to the App Store, these projects show how the work of abolition takes place on every scale and in every space we inhabit.
A special poetry reading / book launch for two collections coming out this spring: Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati, selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and The Lengest Neoi by Stephanie Choi, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize.
I.S. Jones and Meg Kim will join Choi and Keramati in reading.
About the featured collections:
The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err—to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection’s title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi / “Pretty Girl”) and the English suffix for the superlative degree (—est), these poems wander, deviate, and flow across bodies, geographies, and languages. In this collection from Stephanie Choi, you’ll find the poet’s “tongue writing herself, learning to speak.”
In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.
This event is free and open to the public.
PO Box events are MASKS REQUIRED. The space is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom. We always have 2 air purifiers running.
Queer Bachata Social at PO Box Collective, 6900 N Glenwood, on Saturday, May 25th.
Donations – what you can!
Evening starts with a dance class. Come out and join the fun!!! Food, beverages, music ~
As always, our events are MASKS REQUIRED. The @poboxcollective is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom. We always have 2 air purifiers running.
Please join us in a community gathering to express our solidarity with searching mothers in Mexico for the mothers of Palestine and across all borders.
Location: the Memorial for Victims of Police Violence across from the PO Box Collective
Under the el tracks at W Farwell and N Glenwood.
One block south of the Morse Red Line stop.
Friday, May 10, 6:30-8:30
Join us for poetry every 3rd Thursday! This popular series offers in-person readings with local poets.
Thursday May 16th @ 8:00pm – *doors open at 7:30*
The May event features JK Anowe, Ashley Colley, and Jordan Stempleman. Hosted by S. Yarberry.
Free and open to the public. Donations suggested!
As always, our events are MASKS REQUIRED. The @poboxcollective is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom. Two air purifiers will be running.
About the performers:
JK Anowe (he/they) is an MFA+MA candidate at the Litowitz Creative Writing Program and a Gwendolyn M. Carter Fellow in African Studies at Northwestern University. Anowe’s work has appeared in Bakwa Magazine, THE SHORE, Glass Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, Agbowo, 20.35 Africa, and elsewhere. Anowe is the author of the poetry chapbooks Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019) and The Ikemefuna Tributaries (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016). They are currently working on a debut full-length collection.
Ashley Colley‘s poems have appeared in Orion, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Southern Indiana Review,
Prelude, Annulet, Tyger Quarterly(!) and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook, In the Garden (dancing girl press 2022). The recipient of a Fulbright Creative and Performing Arts Grant, she has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver. She is the Center for the Literary Arts Postdoctoral Fellow at WashU.
Jordan Stempleman is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He edits The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal, and since 2011, he has run the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri.
Please join us for a release party for Toby Altman’s
Discipline Park on Saturday 5/11 at 8:00pm (doors open at 7:30pm, wear a mask!).
There will be special guest readings by Alyssa Moore, Amanda Goldblatt, Laaura Goldstein, Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Cean Gamalinda, and Sara Wainscott before we hear from the author himself!
Please share with your friends and can’t wait to see you there!
As always our events are MASKS REQUIRED. The @poboxcollective is accessible by ramp with an accessible bathroom. We will also have 2 air purifiers running.
Here’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to clean out your closet!
We REALLY need:
backpacks
luggage
children’s toys
blankets
plus-size clothing
men’s pants (sizes 30-32)
NO BOOKS!
Drop off all items on Thursday 4/25 and Friday 4/26, 3-8pm