This month’s BONK! performance series will be held on Saturday, October 12th, at 601 6th Street in Racine, BONK! will be at 6:00 p.m. with doors opening at 5:30. Featured performers include: Dead Horses vocalist, Sarah Vos; Texas poet and rapper, Jonathan Moody; and French-American writer, Beatrice Szymkowiak.
What may qualify Sarah Vos as a musician and songwriter most is her deep and vivid life-long relationship with music. Born in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan- and singing herself to sleep before she knew how to talk- Sarah was raised in Wisconsin with her four siblings. Raised on Bible hymns and stories, Sarah has been expressing herself through music and song her entire life. In 2010, she helped form folk band, Dead Horses. Since then, Dead Horses have released three records and have performed with the likes of Trampled by Turtles, Mandolin Orange, and most recently, The Who. Tireless touring has proven to be a fulfilling muse for Sarah as she continues to travel, play music, and write new material reflective of herself and everything around her.
Jonathan Moody received his MFA degree from the University of Pittsburgh and has been published in numerous literary journals such as African American Review, The Common, Crab Orchard Review, and Harvard Review Online. He is the author of two poetry collections: The Doomy Poems and Olympic Butter Gold which won the 2014 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize.
For the past ten years, Moody has taught English at Pearland High School. Moody lives in Pearland, Texas, with his wife and three sons. He is also a rapper and a music video director who goes by the alias Fluke Ellington. His first single and video “Effervescence” featuring Houston underground rap legend K-Rino is available on YouTube.
Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer. She graduated with a MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. She now teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. She is poetry assistant editor at Cream City Review. Her work has appeared in several poetry magazines, including Birds Piled Loosely, the Berkeley Review, the Borderlands Texas Review, OmniVerse, Permafrost magazine, the Portland Review, and Ellipsis. She is also the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Exploratory and experimental, her poetry investigates the new environmental trajectory of the Anthropocene. Her first chapbook RED ZONE was released in Fall 2018. It constitutes the first chapter of her investigations.
The event will be held at OS Projects at 601 6th Street in Racine, WI. OS Projects is a contemporary art gallery in downtown Racine featuring visual artists in solo and small group exhibits. The gallery’s primary focus is on artists living and working in the Chicago-Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee urban corridor. While the range of media the gallery presents is broad—encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video/film and installation—the exhibited artists are unified in their engagement with topical issues, experimentation with materials and processes, and adherence to craft.
Currently, OS Projects is hosting an exhibit by artist Diane Levesque. Ms. Levesque will be present at the BONK! event and give an introduction to her exhibit at the start of the event. For more information on the artist and the exhibit, visit the OS Projects website.
BONK! 