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Visual Artists
Writers Willie Perdomo Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. He has been published in The New York Times Magazine and Bomb and his children's book, Visiting Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Honor. He is a NYFA Arts Fellowship winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, a Urban Artists Initiative/NYC grant recipient and was recently a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books. Excerpt from Looking for Magda:Every New Years Day he walks up 138th Street, from Jackson Avenue to the Third Avenue Bridge looking for Magda. He walks past Brook Avenue looking for the knock in her knees or pressing his ear to the curb in hopes that he could hear a snippet of her laughter. He walks into the 40th Precinct to see if any Desk Appearance Tickets have been claimed in her name. He hangs in Mott Haven Houses and enters rap ciphers with everything he would've said if he had the chance to see her again. He thinks about the way they kissed from one end of Bruckner Boulevard to the other and the way she said that he was playing with fire the last time he begged her to take him back. He looks inside variety stores looking for her favorite teddy bear, the one with the biggest eyes. He even goes as far as to hire a street artist to replicate the way her curls dropped to her hips. "It was as if her hair had hydraulics," he told the artist. Every New Year's Day he wipes away fogged-up bakery windows and before he gives up looking for Magda, he peeks into dental clinics and advises all patients to save before they pull. |
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