Oct 23 2025

Conversation: Radical Publishing, Then and Now with Amy Scholder and Johanna Fateman

THURS | 7PM

On the occasion of Costanza Candeloro and Licit Illicit Bookshop’s reading room project, No Plot, Just Street, please join us for a conversation between editor and filmmaker Amy Scholder and writer Johanna Fateman. The reading room selection at SI centers on books published by High Risk, a provocative anthology series and independent publishing house co-founded by Scholder in the 1990s that was renowned for amplifying transgressive voices and fostering critical conversations around sexuality, identity, and dissent. Together, Scholder and Fateman will discuss the continued importance of independent publishing and cultural criticism under conditions of political repression, from the 1990s culture wars to the present growing wave of state censorship.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Amy Scholder has produced three highly acclaimed feature films: Heightened Scrutiny (2025), My Name Is Andrea (2022), and Disclosure (2020). She is currently shooting a film starring Justin Vivian Bond. As a visionary leader in independent book publishing, she has brought high visibility to her authors and has been praised for her contribution to contemporary literature and popular culture. Over the years she has managed imprints at The Feminist Press, HIGH RISK Books/Serpent’s Tail, Verso, and Seven Stories. She is an editor-at-large at City Lights Books.

Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and co-chief art critic for CULTURED magazine. In 2023 her former band, Le Tigre, performed for the first time since 2005; her tour diary appears in Cookie Jar 2, 2025, a pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. Fateman co-edited, with Amy Scholder, the 2019 semiotext(e) anthology Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin.

Image: Costanza Candeloro, An Urban Sketch from an Artist, 2025