Organizer: Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
Join us on Thursday, November 12 to celebrate the launch of Letters
as Characters: An Anthology of Short Stories (Letter Books, 2026).
Bringing together short stories, personal and historical accounts, and research-based narratives, the anthology asks what happens when letters become more than something we read and write. Its stories move through living, historical, and invented languages, following letters that disappear, transform, fall in love, carry secrets, or resist. Together, they explore what language can do beyond carrying meaning, and what it might do to us in return.
The evening will feature a conversation with contributors Hamid Roslan, Nat Pyper, Kelli Huggins, Mangda Sengvanhpheng, Divya Mehra, and Bianca Ibarlucea.
Edited by Eugenia Bell. Conceived and designed by Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka. Published by Letter Books.
Contributors: Petr Babák, E. A. Bagby, Matthew Stuart, rae willcox, Meg Miller, Adelina Shaidullina, Hamid Roslan, Nat Pyper, Tom Las Kohrs, Amanda-Li Kollberg, Selen Okumuş, Kelli Huggins, Övgü Gökçe, Ara Chalym, Divya Mehra, Isabel Berg, Natalia Szymańska, Chris Turner-Neal, Raelee Fourkiller, Roosje van der Kamp, Bianca Ibarlucea, Ysolde Stienon, Mangda Sengvanhpheng, Laura Martens, Ayomikun Paseda, Manda Orkhid, Yevgen Anfalov, Joanne Lam, Leitu Bonnici, Hiba Ali, Julianna Sanromán Rojas, Maxim Volk, Quenton Miller, Edgar Walthert, and Mark von Schlegell.
About the Speakers:
Eugenia Bell is a longtime editor of exhibition catalogues and books on art, architecture, and the allied fields. Her writing on contemporary art, books, music, and architecture has appeared in Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, Architect’s Newspaper, and New York magazine. She is the art editor of The Yale Review, edits regularly for Inventory Press books, and serves as an editorial consultant to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
Hamid Roslan is a poet and essayist whose work moves between asemic mark-making, translation, and drawing, treating the page as a meeting place for language(s) and line. He is the author of in all the places I could not find you (2022) andparsetreeforestfire (Ethos Books, 2019), a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize. He holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute.
Nat Pyper is an alphabet artist. Their practice of publishing and performance extends from ongoing research on countercultural queer histories. They’ve performed at Performance Space New York, Cooper Cole in Toronto, and PAGEANT in Brooklyn; exhibited at the Typojanchi Typography Biennale in Seoul, Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, and Printed Matter in NYC; and written for Are.na, Draw Down Books, GenderFail, Source Type, and the Walker Art Center. Their book, A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure, was published by Inventory Press and Library Stack in 2025. Their science fiction novella Zurdo..! was published by specific.place in 2026.
Kelli Huggins is a historian, artist, and writer. She holds a master’s in American history from the University of Delaware and works in the museum field. She has published historical nonfiction in various journals and magazines and specializes in the history of human-animal interactions and canine celebrity in the Gilded Age. She also publishes humor comics in online magazines, including The Belladonna and Slackjaw. Kelli was the Writing Resident at Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Garden in Stone Ridge, New York, in February 2025.
Mangda Sengvanhpheng is an artist and death doula whose name means “the light of the full moon.” She is the founder of BACII, a space devoted to grief and loss that offers services and experiences for individuals, communities, and organizations that renew our engagement to life. Mangda has been featured in Vogue, Architectural Digest, New York Magazine, among other publications.
Divya Mehra works with text, image, and code. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Print magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Parsons School of Design and New York University.
Bianca Ibarlucea is a Mexican American artist, graphic designer, and educator from Detroit and Los Angeles whose practice explores how typography and digitization have shaped dominant language systems. She is an Assistant Professor at Southern Connecticut State University and a frequent lecturer and collaborator with the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Bianca holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art.
About the Publisher:
Letter Books is an independent publishing project founded by designers Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka in 2019. Working at the intersection of typography, written language, and culture, Letter Books produces publications, exhibitions, and experiences that explore letters beyond their conventional function. Its publications include National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-Building Tools (2019), Mysterious Letters: Language, Science, and the Voynich Manuscript (2023), and Letters as Characters: An Anthology of Short Stories (2026). Other projects include Imagining Letters: Languages and Scripts as Emancipatory Tools, a lecture presented at ENSBA Lyon in 2021, and The Most Difficult Letter, an exhibition at Print Gallery Tokyo in 2026.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.