Join us on Thursday, May 20th, 7 PM CDT, as The Guild Complex presents Exhibit B will feature incredible performances from artists Anaïs Duplan, Rachel Swearingen, Natasha Mijares, and Sam Heaps.

For more information about the Guild Literary Complex please visit: https://guildcomplex.org/

Exhibit B is a performance series that highlights exciting text-based work in Chicago. Presented by the Guild Literary Complex, a 30-year-old grassroots literary arts organization based in Chicago, Exhibit B showcases prose, poetry, plays, music, and more. We want to create a space that showcases work that you don’t need an MFA to feel and that leaves the audience always wanting more. We want community. We want impact.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College

Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. Her debut poetry collection, violent wave, is forthcoming from PANK Books. She received her MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at various international and national galleries. Her work has appeared in Gravity of the Thing, Hypertext Review, Calamity, Vinyl Poetry, and more.

Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 New American Press Fiction Prize. Her writings have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Heaps is a genderqueer writer and visual artist currently living in Philadelphia. You can find more of their work in Entropy's WOVEN Series, Communion Arts Journal, Taco Bell Quarterly, Giallo Lit, and many others. Their debut is forthcoming from CLASH Books in 2022. Heaps holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches at the University of the Arts.

To create a more accessible space, we ask that if you or anyone you know may need disability accommodations (e.g., sign language interpreters, alternative formats) please contact us at exhibitb312@gmail.com as soon as possible. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.