Tribes Programming

Tribes hosts the annual Charlie Parker festival in August.  View Mayor Bloomberg's declaration: proclamation

Tribes has participated in collaborative programming with such institutions as Lincoln Center, where Lawrence “Butch” Morris staged his “Poet’s Choir,” and the Whitney Museum, where Tribes artists staged the play “En Vogue” as part of the Basquiat Retrospective. Poets from Tribes have performed at the St. Marks’ Poetry Project, the Public Theater, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Schomburg Center in Harlem, Barnes & Noble, and more recently at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Borders Books.

In the year 2000, Poets’ House, City Lore, and St. Marks’ Poetry Project considered Tribes to be an important enough venue on the literary scene of New York City to make the organization one of the sites for its People’s Poetry Gathering, a weeklong citywide celebration. As part of the week long celebration Tribes hosted a massive 24-hour reading for that event, featuring over 200 writers.

Besides sponsoring events in New York, Tribes has also cosponsored readings in cities as far as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, New Orleans, and Chicago. The organization has even gone so far as to dispatch a few of its members abroad to stage poetry/dance performances in Copenhagen, where they were greeted warmly by the Danish artistic community. During the holiday season last year, to much acclaim, Tribes joined hands with its sister organization, The House of Tribes Theater, to present “Up Close and Personal with Wynton Marsalis.” An encore presentation featuring Wynton Marsalis and his band, as well as Abby Lincoln, is scheduled to take place next summer.