Writing in Relation (Language) | Forge Project x Open Room

Thursday, May 7, 7–9pm, join members of the 2025–2026 Forging journal cohort for a conversation on issues and opportunities facing writers working today hosted at Performance Space New York as part of Forge Project’s year-long installation and residency in PSNY’s OPEN ROOM.

Forging editorial advisory committee member Joseph M. Pierce will moderate a conversation between writers and cohort members Adrienne Keene and Angélica María Cuevas on working across genres, languages, and geographical contexts, from personal histories of displacement on Cherokee Nation to current fights for territorial sovereignty in the Amazon. The writers will also discuss how they engage with and hold themselves accountable to these stories, and the role art plays in mobilizing narratives beyond cultural spaces and into broader political arenas.  

About the Panelists

Joseph M. Pierce (ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, Cherokee Nation Citizen) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025) and Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019). He has published work in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, and in popular outlets including Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. With S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds, and in 2024-2025 he was a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Instagram: @pepepierce

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Angélica Cuevas-Guarnizo is a Colombian communicator, curator, and journalist based in New York. For over a decade, she has collaborated with Indigenous organizations and communities across Abya Yala to design communication strategies that safeguard their lands, waters, and ways of life, and affirm territorial sovereignty. Her reporting and research have documented and supported processes led by the Shipibo Conibo Nation in Peru, Sarayaku in Ecuador, the Murui Muina Nation in the Colombian Amazon, and the Kankuamo communities of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
Angélica serves as Communications Coordinator at ESCR-Net, a global network uniting more than 300 social movements and human rights organizations across 80 countries. In this role, she advances transnational narrative strategies and campaigns around climate, economic, and gender justice — strengthening alliances among communities and organizations throughout the Global South.
In parallel, she co-directs Liana, an interdisciplinary collective based in Brooklyn that explores the relationships between art, plants, and politics. Through its ongoing curatorial project COCAWORLDS, Liana reclaims the cultural, medicinal, and spiritual significance of the coca plant. With Liana, Angélica has organized exhibitions and public programs in New York, including Coca, Palabra-Mundo, presented in 2024 at the United Nations Headquarters and at the Open Society Foundations. She holds an MA in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research (NYC).
Instagram: @angelicamcuevas

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Adrienne Keene is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and is writer and visual artist. She writes essays and books that explore how Native people are represented in popular culture, as well as exploring the impacts of settler colonialism on her family. She is the creator and author of the blog Native Appropriations, the co-creator of the All My Relations Podcast, and the author of Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present. She currently lives on the Cherokee Reservation in Tulsa, OK, where she is a 2025-2027 Tulsa Artist Fellow.
Instagram: @nativeapprops