too close to hold: a night of singing and readings

6pm | Exhibition Walkthrough
7pm | Poetry Reading
8pm | Karaoke

In conjunction with Stephanie Comilang: An Apparition, A Song, we invite you to join us for a night of poetry and singing. Paolo Javier, Yasmin Adele Majeed, and Aldrin Regina Valdez will read from their own work—and the work of friends and influences—finding resonances with Comilang’s explorations of migratory life, collective memory, intergenerational exchanges, and remnants of colonization.

In Comilang’s work, karaoke unfolds as a shared ritual, an act of emotional survival, and a quiet form of resistance. Search for Life II, for example, considers the histories of pearl diving from sea farming Indigenous and Muslim Filipino communities on Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, to the Gulf States, where pearling emerged as an economic force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The film ends with a karaoke scene featuring a young Emirati and Bicolano woman singing Dirty Projectors’ “Search for Life.”

Following the readings, the mics will open for a night of karaoke! Light bites and drinks will be provided.

Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, Westchester County; El Maadi, Cairo; and North Delta, Greater Vancouver. The recipient of grants and fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, he has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason). Javier was a featured artist in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York (2015) and the eighth edition of the Queens International, Volumes (2018). He is the author of Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On), a new volume of serial dream poetry (& a chant) published by Astoria's Poets of Queens. The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010–2014), he lives with his family in Jackson Heights, unceded Lenapehoking.

Yasmin Adele Majeed is a writer living in New York. Her fiction appears and is forthcoming in Narrative, Guernica, Joyland, Dirt, American Short Fiction, Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and The Best American Short Stories 2025. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Kundiman, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.

Aldrin Regina Valdez is a bakla writer and visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat, 2018), selected as a 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. Aldrin Regina has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their poetry and visual art appear in The Felt, Femmescapes, The Margins at Asian American Writers' Workshop, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and The Recluse. They have also presented work at Dixon Place, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Poetry Project. Collaborating with writer and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr, Aldrin Regina co-organized Foundational Sharing (2011–2015), a salon series of readings, performances, and visual art. More recently, they co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.