Issue 17: Object Play — All Issues

Yi Xin Tong is an artist and fisherman. He uses multimedia installation, site-specific projects, video, and sound to analyze seemingly disparate social conditions, and our contradictory relationships with ourselves and with other living beings, objects, and cultural entities. His experience living on the outskirts of New York City led him to a long-term multimedia fishing project that challenges the iconic image of the city as the pinnacle of human civilization, and seeks relief, nature, and weird things. Tong’s work has been exhibited at BRIC Biennial, Guangzhou Airport Biennale, UCCA, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, NARS Foundation, MOCA Shanghai, CAFA Art Museum, and chi K11 art museum.

Issue 17: Object PlayYi Xin TongOctober 14, 2020Video, Gravesend Bay, Dog Shark, Sea Robin, Clearnose Skate, COVID-19

ONCE MORE TO GREEN-WOOD

Safia Jama was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, RHINO, Cagibi, Boston Review, Spoken Black Girl, and No Dear. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of US series. Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience, which was selected for the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set series (Akashic Books 2020).

ANOTHER METONYM (or the hot plate)

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird (Nightboat Books, 2018), a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Her other collections include day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf , written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (Belladonna/ Danspace, 2019) and Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Asiya teaches poetry to children at Saint Ann’s School and occasionally leads an English conversation group for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library. A member of the Belladonna Collaborative, her work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Brooklyn Poets, Dickinson House, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New York Public Library, among others. Recent work appears in e-flux, BOMB Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Chicago Review, Social Text, FENCE, and elsewhere. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist-in-Residence and also currently a writer-in-residence at Danspace Project. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she loves animals.

Underwater New York is a platform for writing, art, and music inspired by the waterways of New York City.