In the winter of 2021, my friend Geoffrey Mak suggested we organize a reading about raving, as part of the community events program I ran at Nowadays. We thought it would only happen once, but 150 people showed up, so we kept doing it, with McKenzie Wark joining soon after as our third curator.
Writing on Raving is now an ongoing reading and performance series that opens a space for critical thinking, creative language, and verbal performance to celebrate, critique, contextualize, and vibe-check the rave, the club, the dance floor, and techno from diverse and unheard perspectives. We have organized 18 readings with over four dozen readers in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We also talk on panels, chat with journalists, and make the occasional mix.
In 2025, O/R Books published Writing on Raving, an anthology of essays, poetry and fiction drawn from the first three years of the series. To get a feel for the book, we recommend reading Tavia Nyongo’o’s review in Texte zur Kunst.
Writing on Raving is now an ongoing reading and performance series that opens a space for critical thinking, creative language, and verbal performance to celebrate, critique, contextualize, and vibe-check the rave, the club, the dance floor, and techno from diverse and unheard perspectives. We have organized 18 readings with over four dozen readers in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We also talk on panels, chat with journalists, and make the occasional mix.