About this Event
Please join us, the event will take place in the William P. Kelly Skylight Room, on the 9th floor at the CUNY Graduate Center and online.
For the livestream, register in for this webinar:
https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DKsksFn7SR6MyAv2U5sWBw
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Dr. jah Elyse Sayers in conversation with author Zee Dempster about her book The Aurora Satellite, a speculative fiction novel that explores what humanity carries forward after the known world disappears.
The Aurora Satellite is a speculative fiction novel that explores what humanity carries forward after the known world disappears.
Set in the near future, our protagonist Rae is living on the USS Doris Miller, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with the last surviving humans on an earth whose surface is fully submerged in water. Rae lives a self-centered existence until an ominous Drone attack almost kills Banks, a father figure to her. While he is in a coma, she discovers his archive containing secrets to the past life of mankind on land. Rising political tensions, pending starvation, the struggle to hold onto intimacy and the realities of a spent nuclear core threaten to destroy their already limited hope for a future. Will Rae be able to overcome her selfish desires long enough to use the past to save herself and mankind?
Dr. jah Elyse Sayers (they/them) directs their creative energy toward liberatory placemaking through research, writing, artmaking, teaching, and building. With a PhD in Earth & Environmental Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, Sayers prioritizes poetic, participatory, and insurgent methods in their research, rooted in Black geographies. They argue against methods that conscript particular people to particular places, instead calling for attentiveness to embodied relationalities and mobilities as people make place. Their research offers theories of placemaking, experimental methods of place-based study, and activated praxes of protecting a place and its constituent placemakers and methods toward liberatory ends, and their current book project offers a political geography of erosion and Black, working class, and queer and trans placemaking at the People's Beach and Jacob Riis Park. Sayers is the initiator and a member of the People’s Riisearch Group–a team of community-based researchers caring for histories, futures, and the now of queer Riis–and an initiating member of the Riis Beach Bloc Association–a civic group and space for sharing knowledge and resources toward community and environmental care at Riis Beach. They have taught at the City College of New York (CCNY), Drexel University, and University of Connecticut in the areas of urban studies, civic engagement, and environmental studies, and their writing has been published in Deem Journal, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies, Society & Space Magazine, and Women's Studies Quarterly.
A lifelong New Yorker, finds inspiration for her stories from a variety of sources. She is the Assistant Director of IRADAC, the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean and Assistant Coordinator for AFCP, the Africana Studies Certificate Program. She is a HEO delegate and a Welfare Fund trustee for PSC CUNY. Her background includes degrees in computer science and government and politics from St. John’s University, and multiple courses in audio engineering and the performing arts. These experiences provide the intellectual stimulus for her characters and their storylines. Her love of science fiction movies, song lyrics and instrumental music inspired her preferred genre of writing, speculative fiction. She has attended the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She participated in the MEC Center for Black Literature’s Wild Seeds Writer’s Retreat online and The Writer’s Hotel conference, where she received the 2020 Sara Patton Fiction Stipend. Zee’s first novel titled “The Aurora Satellite,” visits a post-apocalyptic earth in the not-so-distant future. Writing is now her passion. She has completed her second novel The Body Travelers, preparing a sequel to The Aurora Satellite, exploring the richness of poetry and harvesting ideas for future writing projects.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 5th Avenue, New York, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.