Friday through Sunday: OutWrite Festival, Virtual

During this moment of unprecedented and inescapable attacks on the LGBTQIA community happening across the country, coming together to celebrate queer stories, expression, art, community, and visibility feels more important than ever. Thankfully, OutWrite, D.C.’s annual LGBTQIA literary festival, is happening virtually this year from August 11 to 13. The virtual aspect makes the festival accessible to even more readers, writers, and curious community members. The festival’s wide-ranging programming is entirely free and open to the public with registration encouraged. “It’s crucial now more than ever to offer safe spaces to share, explore, and hopefully expand the understanding of our history and our future,” Emily Holland, a local poet and the 2023 OutWrite Chair, tells City Paper. This year’s literary festival, Holland continues, “brings together tremendous talent from around the D.C. region and nation by featuring creatives whose imaginations and intellect supply the fuel for dialogue and change.” As we previously reported, D.C. has a thriving community of readers and writers and OutWrite’s schedule is reflective of this abundance, featuring a range of programs  as diverse as the queer community itself. “We wanted to have some programming respond to our current political moment while also focusing on joy, exuberance, and creation,” Holland says. Sessions that personally stand out to this local queer writer are the opening night panel, Trans and Nonbinary Presents and Futures, Saturday’s Queering the Publishing Industrial Complex (at 3:30 p.m.), Sunday’s Queer Stories: Writing Our Way into Belonging (at 12:30 p.m.), and At the Gay Bar: LGBTQ+ Bars in History and as Community Centers, which takes place Saturday evening at 6:30 p.m. At the Gay Bar will feature Jo McDaniel and Coach, co-owners of one of D.C.’s most beloved queer bars, As You Are. “Queer bars are a gathering place for the queer community while also serving as a battleground for a lot of the larger themes we’re discussing [at the festival],” Holland says. “It’s almost a parallel to the excitement about queer stories and queer publishing despite book bans.” All OutWrite 2023 panels and readings can be viewed live on the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s YouTube page. The smaller workshops will take place over Zoom with RSVPs required. Don’t fret if you’re busy this weekend, though! The panel and reading recordings will be uploaded and permanently available on the Center’s website after the festival for all to see and learn from, adding even more essential conversations and stories to the ever-growing queer literary canon. OutWrite starts at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 11 and runs through 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 13, virtually. thedccenter.org/outwrite-2023. Free, registration is encouraged. —Serena Zets 

Saturday: Tananarive Due at the National Book Festival

Some parents, when raising their children, try to shield them from the horrors of the world. In turn, they deprive them access to anything that is horror related, whether it be books or movies. Author Tananarive Due’s mother was different, exposing her to all manner of things that go bump in the night. “My late mother … was the first horror fan in my life,” Due tells City Paper. “She gave me my first Stephen King novel, which was The Shining … Any horror movie that was out, she wanted to see. I did inherit my love of horror from her, for sure.” Upon reflection, Due now realizes that horror was her mother’s preferred manner of escapism. “I really feel that my mother was using her love of horror as a way to leach out trauma from the civil rights movement,” Due explains. (Due and her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, chronicled Stephens Due’s experience in the 2003 memoir Freedom in the Family.) “My mother had a lot of real life fears and I believe some PTSD from the Civil Rights era that made horror a soothing place for her.” Due, an award-winning author who teaches courses in Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA, will appear at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival on Aug. 12 to discuss her latest book, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, a collection of short stories that recall The Twilight Zone—in 2019 Due co-wrote an episode with her husband and collaborator Steven Barnes for Jordan Peele’s version of the television show. One of Wishing Pool’s stories, “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge”—recently nominated as a World Fantasy Award Finalist Short Fiction—tells the story of a teen forced to visit his grandmother, a Black movie star of the 1930s. “What I do is take the things that are fascinating me or scaring me at the moment,” says Due, explaining the ideation behind her stories. “This old woman has been feeding an unknown creature at her cabin in the woods for all these years. It’s kind of a manifestation of her internal trauma but it’s a physical manifestation of that … That is definitely the one I would like to see adapted [for screen].” Tananarive Due will appear at the Library of Congress National Book Festival at 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 12 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Ballroom A, 801 Mount Vernon Pl. NW, followed by a book signing at noon. The festival runs from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Aug. 12. loc.gov. Free. —Christina Smart

Saturday: Hip-Hop Block Party at the NMAAHC

Fifty years ago in a Bronx basement, DJ Kool Herc reportedly performed the first breakbeat by mixing two copies of the same record, setting the table for a decade of experimentation that led hip-hop to explode into the public consciousness in the 1980s. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is marking the golden anniversary by dedicating its second annual Hip-Hop Block Party to the full history of rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti. The action inside the museum will include special exhibits as well as screenings of the 1982 film Wild Style and the 1984 television show Graffiti Rock. The outdoor stage is booked from early afternoon until evening, including sets by music director Adam Blackstone, rapper and radio personality Monie Love, veteran DJ Kid Capri, and a nightcap “dance party featuring a world-renowned DJ who is revealed moments before the performance,” according to the organizers. A livestream will be available for anyone who can’t make it down to the Mall. The 2023 Hip-Hop Block Party runs from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Ave. NW. nmaahc.si.edu/hiphop50. Free, but passes are required. A waitlist is available if all passes are taken. —Joe Warminsky

Saturday: RE/ENVISIONING Community Day at the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities

Since July 5, visitors to the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Gallery have been invited to deconstruct and decolonize their personal histories alongside six featured artists in the RE/ENVISIONING exhibition, on display until August 18. The six multi-hyphenated artists include Adele Yiseol Kenworthy, Antonio McAfee, Stephanie Mercedes, Fargo Tbakhi, Jessica Valoris, and Stephanie J. Williams. Nicole Dowd, the head of public programs at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, and local independent curator and arts administrator Allison Nance are the introspection-inducing exhibition’s curators. While all artists explore questions of historical erasure, and the reclaiming and reimagining of their respective stories, the creative expression of their decolonized narratives take notably different forms, refreshingly represented in Valoris’ ritual performances, Mercedes’ sound-based installations, and McAfee’s photographic portraits. Ahead of the exhibit’s closing next Friday, the RE/ENVISIONING Community Day on Aug. 12 will prompt participants to dive deeper into any outdated internal stories during two artist-led workshops. Over a two-hour period, you’ll explore the concept of “abolitionist performatives” with Tbakhi, and the love language of cut fruit in Asian and Asian American households with Kenworthy. Dowd and Nance, will also join the event, giving you a final opportunity to deeply connect with the artworks and the talented humans behind them. The RE/ENVISIONING Community Day starts at noon on Aug. 12 at the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, 200 I St. SE. dcarts.dc.gov. Free. —Irene Bantigue

Monday: Nora Kelly Band at Pie Shop

Nora Kelly Band are bringing their Rodeo Clown theatrics to the equally unconventional Pie Shop on Aug. 14 for the band’s D.C. debut as they open for local multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Ray. Monday’s gig brings together the Nora Kelly Band, Ray, Kelsey Blackstone, and Ghost Pepper for an unmissable and eclectic lineup of both local and international talent. “As a bunch of Canadians, we’re really excited to play in all these iconic American cities alongside local acts in sick DIY spaces,” Nora Kelly tells City Paper. “D.C. is personally important to me because my favorite punk band, Fugazi, is from here.” The band’s debut album, Rodeo Clown, comes out on Aug. 25, which means the Pie Shop audience will hear exclusive, unreleased tracks. If the band’s fun clown aesthetic and consistently coordinated outfits aren’t enough to get you to the Pie Shop then maybe the promise of exclusive live music will. Kelly tells City Paper to expect “high energy, full-throttle fun. Our goal is to bring so much goofiness and joy to the performance that the audience can take a little home in a doggy bag after the show.” Kelly elaborates, “I hope that seeing us be weird and imperfect and all the while having a great time up on that stage, it inspires folks to allow themselves things in their own lives.” Check out the Nora Kelly Band’s D.C. debut if you need a reminder that life is best lived, and music is best heard, when it’s weird and imperfect. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 14 at Pie Shop, 1339 H St. NE. pieshopdc.com. $15–$18. —Serena Zets 

Tuesday: Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová at the Anthem 

The Swell Season’s music brims with hope and is laden with regrets—borne of the decades-long relationship between Irish singer-songwriter and guitarist Glen Hansard and Czech-Icelandic pianist and singer Markéta Irglová. Hansard was already a seasoned, Dublin-based musician with the Frames, who featured in the 1991 Irish rock ’n’ roll movie The Commitments, and Irglová was a musical prodigy still in her late teens, when the duo—recording as The Swell Season—released their self-titled album in 2006. Many of the songs would reappear in the 2007 film Once, a semi-biographical tale of a charming Irish busker who falls for a Czech pianist; during the press tour for the film, Hansard and Irglová began a short-lived romantic relationship. Once, a sweet film about love and loss and music, was a sleeper indie hit, winning an Oscar for the melancholic love song “Falling Slowly.” Once subsequently became a successful Broadway musical, garnering eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical in 2012. If the Swell Season’s first album and the Once soundtrack were an ode to starting over and finding new love, their sophomore album, 2009’s Strict Joy, documents their breakup in achingly beautiful and haunting verses. Reversing the sentiment of “Falling Slowly,” in “Low Rising,” the first single from the second album, Hansard laments “There is no further place to fall.” The beautiful music they make together is not euphemistic but only true in the most literal of senses; their musical partnership has proved itself deeper and richer than their ephemeral romance. In their recent single, “The Answer Is Yes,” composed by Irglová who sings lead on the track, she revisits their relationship and details how they have remained an important part in each other’s lives, knowing each other’s spouses and children. It is full of gratitude and growth, looking back and looking forward. She asks if they had to do it all over again, with all the heartache and pain and the wisdom to know where they would end up, would they? The answer is yes. Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová of the Swell Season play at 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 15 at the Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. theanthemdc.com. $55-125. —Colleen Kennedy