PARACHUTE: The Coney Island Performance Festival: July 2012

Our Mission

Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival is a community-based literary organization. The cornerstone of Parachute's work is a free two-day festival featuring renowned poets and writers reading at the New York Aquarium after hours, in the Alien Stingers Jellyfish Exhibit. Throughout the year, Parachute also offers creative writing workshops and innovative poetic events.

Parachute celebrates Coney Island’s vivid literary present and past through readings, letterpress broadsides, workshops and attention to the literary luminaries that have walked across Coney’s shores and been inspired by it—Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, and Henry Miller, to name but a few.

About the Artistic Director

Amanda Deutch is a native New Yorker with Coney Island roots. She first got the sand in her shoes standing in her nana's kitchen while the adults talked about "The Half Moon Hotel," which was up the block from their apartment on 29th street in Coney Island. The words, "Half Moon Hotel," and "Coney Island" rang like mysterious poetry to her nine year-old ears. Amanda has had poetry published widely. Some of her recent work can be found in Esque Mag online and Boog City. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and in 2007, she was awarded a Footpaths to Creativity fellowship on Flores Island in the Azores. She lives in Brooklyn where she facilitates writing workshops, works at the Coney Island History Project and is a third generation skee-ball player.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

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