TUE, OCT 8, 6:30PM

THE EIGHTH MOON

“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris Kraus

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism.

As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.

Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.

JENNIFER KABAT

Jennifer Kabat’s The Eighth Moon on a 1840s socialist uprising in her town will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2024. Half of a diptych, the second volume Nightshining will come out in 2025. Her work has been supported by numerous grants including a Silvers Foundation Grant and a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. Her essays have appeared in BOMB, Granta, Frieze, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, LARB, New York Review, 4 Columns and the White Review and been anthologized in Best American Essays. She often collaborates with artists and contributes to museum catalogues. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

BLACK, QUEER, & UNTOLD

Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a creative Black Queer kid, Jon Key imagined himself as a professional artist and designer. But in lecture halls and critiques in art school, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity — the stories and artifacts that reflected him.

Jon started asking himself questions: What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer graphic designer? Someone from the South? Could his identity be communicated through a poster or a book? How could identity be archived in a design canon that has consistently erased contributions by designers who were not white, straight, and male?

In Black, Queer, & Untold, acclaimed designer and artist Jon Key delves into these questions and manifests a book he (and so many others) needed when they were coming up. Black, Queer & Untold pays tribute to the incredible designers, artists, and people who came before. Jon offers these stories an enduring, reverential stage – and in doing so, gifts us a book that immediately takes its place among the creative arts canon.

JON KEY

Jon(athan) Key is an artist, designer, and writer originally from Seale, Alabama. After receiving his BFA from RISD, Jon began his design career at Grey Advertising in NYC before moving on to work with HBO, Nickelodeon, and The Public Theater. Now he is co-founder of the Brooklyn–based design studio Morcos Key with Wael Morcos. As an educator, Jon has taught at MICA, Parsons, and currently teaches at Cooper Union and SVA. Jon is also a Co-Founder and Design Director of Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating, producing, supporting, and showcasing work by artists of color, particularly women, queer, and trans artists of color. Jon was selected for Forbes 30 under 30 Art and Style list for 2020 and was the Frank Staton Chair in Graphic Design at Cooper Union 2018-2019. His work has been featured in Jeffery Deitch Gallery NYC, the Armory Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

He holds an MA in Design Research, Writing and Criticism from SVA (Class of 2021). He co-teaches Approaches to Design History, Part II with Alicia Ajayi in the Fall Semester.