We’re huge fans of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. And they’re huge fans of us because we are the largest nationwide gathering of mixed-race and multiracial people and families! Check out this quick video! And make sure you share it with your friends and family! See you this week June 10-11, 2016. Don’t forget to register!-Heidi Durrow, Festival Founder
[youtube]https://youtu.be/lkeRh2ZpZ6E[/youtube]
We can’t wait to see you at the Mixed Remixed Festival June 10-11, 2016!
Japanese American National Museum
100 N. Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Public Transportation
The best way to get to the festival is using Los Angeles’ wonderful Metro system.
Take the Gold Line and get off at the Little Tokyo/Arts District station. The station is right across the street from the festival. You can also take advantage of the Metro Parking Validation Program by going to a participating business to get a validation card. For more information, click here. The closest parking lot to the Festival is the lot at Temple St/Alameda St (428 E. Temple St).
Our wonderful donor Lenora Drew found this great resource to finding parking near the Mixed Remixed Festival at the Japanese American National Museum, 100 N. Central Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
Check out ParkMe.com.
Click for Parking Options via ParkMe.com
***There will be a full 55-hour weekend closures & new traffic configuration at 1st/Alameda the weekend of the Festival.***
Westbound 1st St Traffic
Local detour
From 1st/Vignes: Right on Vignes St., left on Temple St., left on Judge John Aiso St., back to 1st St.
From 1st/Alameda: Right on Alameda St., left on Temple St., left on Judge John Aiso St., back on 1st
Alternate detour
From: 1st/Mission: Right on Mission Road, left on Cesar E. Chavez Ave., left on Spring St., back to 1st St.
Eastbound 1st St Traffic
Local detour
From 1st/Judge John Aiso: Left on Judge John Aiso St., right on Temple St., right on Vignes St., left back to 1st St.
Alternate detour
From 1st/Main: left on Main St., right on Cesar E. Chavez Ave., right on Mission Road, back to 1st St.
We’re excited to provide several family activities at the Mixed Remixed Festival June 11, 2016. FREE! Join us for this amazing annual celebration of stories of mixed-race and multiracial families and people. We will have FACE PAINTERS, CRAFT ACTIVITIES, and STORYTELLING TIME FOR KIDS of all ages to enjoy. Oh, yeah, and yes, it’s all FREE! Learn more about our storytellers below!
Maria Leonard Olsen is a biracial woman whose parents were forbidden by law to marry in Maryland in the early 1960s. She is a lawyer, journalist, radio show host and author of the children’s book, “Mommy, Why’s Your Skin So Brown?” and two others. A UVA Law School graduate, Maria served in the Clinton Administration’s Justice Department, fostered newborns awaiting adoption, and has been on the boards of Children’s National Medical Center BOV, among others.
We are seeking volunteers for on-site help for the 2016 Mixed Remixed Festival. Please fill out the form at the link below indicating your availability if you would like to join us! We seriously need your help! Can you donate a few hours of your time to help with this AMAZING festival, the Mixed Remixed Festival? For set-up on June 9 or during the festival days June 10-11? We’re looking for greeters, bag stuffers, chair movers, fun Tweeters, bloggers, photographers, stage handlers, etc. You get a t-shirt and lots of good vibes. Please sign up ASAP!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Heidi Durrow
Phone: 213-293-7077
Email: heidi@mixedremixed.org
Website: www.mixedremixed.org
Twitter: @mixedremixed
Instagram: mixedremixed
#mixedremixed
LOS ANGELES, CA-May 24, 2016 – Mixed Chicks, the leading hair care product line for curly hair, has signed on as a Silver Sponsor of the Mixed Remixed Festival, the nation’s largest gathering of mixed-race and multiracial families and artists. The Festival will take place at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles (100 N. Central Avenue), June 10-11, 2016.
Now in its third year, the Festival celebrates stories of multiracial Americans and families, the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. A free public event, the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial and multicultural families and individuals for workshops, readings, performances, and film screenings.
“It is an honor to have Mixed Chicks as a sponsor,” says Durrow who calls herself an Afro-Viking because she is African-American and Danish. “The company’s products directly reflect the diversity of the Mixed experience which is very much the American experience.” The company’s founders will also participate in a special panel presentation—Naturally Curly or Straight Hair Curious: Tips and Talk about “Biracial” Hair–on June 11, 2016 at 10:00am.
The Festival, a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization, is produced by Durrow a New York Times best-selling writer, and a talented team of volunteers.
In 2015, the Mixed Remixed Festival attracted close to 700 people from across the country and featured dozens of writers, scholars and performers including Comedy Central’s Al Madrigal and New York Times best-selling author Jamie Ford.
Registration is now open for the third annual Mixed Remixed Festival, a free event that is open to the public. The complete Festival schedule can be found online at www.mixedremixed.org.
FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:
Festival sponsors include: Silver Sponsor: Mixed Chicks, Emerging Sponsor: Home Advisor, Japanese American National Museum, Pitfire Artisan Pizza, Total Wine & More, Mixed Roots Foundation, Whole Foods, Zevia, Zapier, Algonquin Books, My Family Builders, Six Flags. This event is supported in part by Poets & Writers through grants it has received from the Irvine Foundation and the Hearst Foundations.
We’re so excited to announce that the founders of Mixed Chicks, the amazing hair care products that are creating a “curly revolution,” will be at Mixed Remixed to help you rock your curls.
Storytelling Time with Maria Olsen
June 11, 2016
11:30-12:30
FREE!
Maria Leonard Olsen is a biracial woman whose parents were forbidden by law to marry in Maryland in the early 1960s. She is a lawyer, journalist, radio show host and author of the children’s book, “Mommy, Why’s Your Skin So Brown?” and two others. A UVA Law School graduate, Maria served in the Clinton Administration’s Justice Department, fostered newborns awaiting adoption, and has been on the boards of Children’s National Medical Center BOV, among others.
Bombarding the Slush Pile: Literary Submissions with Women Who Submit
June 10, 2016 11:30am-12:30pm
REGISTER HERE!Democracy Lab
This workshop is open to literary writers interested in creating a submission practice and/or increasing their readership by being published in top tier journals. If accepted, we will provide an overview of basics, including creating a submission schedule, submission tracking, and cover letter development. Participants will leave the workshop with simple submission materials. The session is appropriate for literary writers. All are welcome.
Women Who Submit co-founder Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a high school English and drama teacher, poet and fiction writer. Sundress will publish her poetry collection, Built with Safe Spaces, in fall 2016. Co-founder Ashaki M. Jackson is a social psychologist and poet. Her chapbook, Surveillance, is available through Writ Large Press. Senior member Tisha Reichle is a high school teacher and fiction writer whose work is included in The Acentos Review and Santa Fe Writers Project.
Women Who Submit seeks to empower women and nonbinary writers by creating physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging literary submissions, and clarifying the submission and publication process. In our fourth operation year, we have chapters in California’s Bay Area, Long Beach and Las Vegas with new possible roots in Arizona and North Dakota. The founding body has a membership of over 30 women, and our virtual communities each exceed 1,000 persons.
Just over two years ago, I received an email from Mixed Remixed founder Heidi Durrow, stating I’d been selected as a featured writer for that year’s festival. Heidi had no idea that her choice would come to transform my entire life.
I knew I wanted to be part of the Festival as far back as 2008, when Heidi ran a festival under a different name. Back then, I was immersed in my grad school program on the East Coast and didn’t have anything creative to show. Instead, I became a chair at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in 2012 and presented my master’s thesis about the “tragic mulatta narrative.” While CMRS was amazing, I kept tabs on Heidi’s work and waited for her to reemerge with a festival project. When she finally started Mixed Remixed, I sent in my submission around midnight on the very last day of open applications.
All throughout grad school, I wrestled with a dual existence. I liked academia, but I couldn’t stop writing a memoir about my relationship with my black father who had died in 2001. My thesis no doubt helped spark this fever, as reading the works of Nella Larsen, Danzy Senna and Heidi herself made me desperate to share my own mixed race story.
In fact, Heidi helped fuel my desire to fuse my two worlds of literature and race even before I knew who she was. In the pages of the canonical book Black, White, Other, Heidi and others shared their experiences about being mixed race. The book came out in 1994 and I read it like the Bible, desperate then find race mirrors in my every day life.
When I received my acceptance from Heidi, I was at the end of a yearlong relationship, was teaching at an after school program, and had just been accepted to an intensive teaching credential program at San Jose State. Every time I stepped onto the SJSU campus, I felt overwhelmed by dread, and every time I told my students at the after school program to follow their dreams, I felt like a hypocrite. I had known I wanted to become a full-fledged writer since I was seven years old.
As fate would have it, or perhaps just good luck, my then boyfriend broke up with me and left me in a pile of tears. Once I wiped them away, I got back to work on my memoir and found letters from my father from 2000 and 2001, advising me to pursue an untraditional career path in the Arts. I practiced my reading for the festival on my coworkers at the after school program, and the look of wonder in their eyes was one I’d never seen before. The day before the festival, I stopped by my ex-boyfriend’s apartment to drop off his things, and then continued down 101 with a resolve to put my career before any relationship goals.
I fell in love with Mixed Remixed, and I fell in love with L.A. The reactions from the audience at our little reading (Mixed Remixed has big readings now) made me feel like my story was their story. Audience members came up to me after the reading, and I got validation not only as a writer, but as a mixed race writer as well. For the first time in my life, I knew my story had merit, not just to those looking in from the outside, but also to those who share the same mixed up DNA as myself. And theirs was the validation I needed.
By fall, I had transferred to one of the after school program’s L.A. County branches and began crafting my freelance career. By the next fall, I published an article in the online magazine For Harriet, called “What It Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives,” which discusses being mixed race during the increased coverage of police brutality. With this article I experienced the life changing nature of a viral story. I received personal messages, retweets and Facebook shares from mixed race people across the globe. They told me I had been able to put their thoughts into words in a way that finally made sense to them.
I also received an inundation of criticism from black and mixed-race men and women who all tried to define me in different ways. Some claimed I was black, some claimed I was mixed race. Some said I was delusional. Others said I was stuck up. Throughout all this backlash, I was able to keep a level head, largely because I knew I was part of a mixed race community, full of people whose identities had also been questioned and who knew the only way to stay sane is to remain true to your own self-perception.
Mixed Remixed has changed my life in other ways as well. I’ve made friendships, some of which I know will last a lifetime. I’ve networked with other writers, as well as filmmakers and musicians. I’ve found a home at a yearly event that stays with me all year long, and my life in L.A. is made sweeter by the connections I’ve made inside those doors.
After my viral article a mixed race writer named Sarah, whom I hadn’t met before, asked me to write an educators’ guide to accompany the biracial anthology she wrote with a co-author named Bryony. Last year I volunteered at the festival, and this year I’ll be meeting Sarah and Bryony, who are now friends and coming out from Puerto Rico and England, respectively. They’ll be panelists at the event, and we’ll be selling both their anthology and the educators’ guide, the latter of which is about to hit the shelves.
I can’t wait to walk through those doors in June and see what’s in store for this year’s festival. I knew no one my first year, and my second year I knew just a few from the year before. This June I’m excited to reconnect with a growing number of friends and acquaintances, and I look forward to meeting new members of the Mixed Remixed family. Heidi has built a veritable wonderland for mixed race folks, and through her hard work and passion she continues to change lives.
_____________
Shannon Luders-Manuel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Essence.com, For Harriet, The Establishment and Multiracial Media, among others. Follow her on Twitter @shannon_luders or visit her blog at www.shannonludersmanuel.com.
REGISTER FOR THE 2016 FESTIVAL JUNE 10-11, 2016 NOW! IT’S FREE!
REGISTER HERE!
Neither fish nor fowl, exotic but slightly shy of ethnic, colorful but not quite white, multicultural by blood but acultural by practice, products of the global village but in a world all our own.
We are normal people who fall outside of the norm.
We are the fastest growing minority in the US–though I never knew that we were counted as a group.
We know how much #BlackLivesMatter. Our blood was spilled along with that of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Akai Gurley. We are equally outraged by the 300+ cases of black deaths at the hands of police in 2015, and by the fact that Peter Liang was a fall guy one of them. We are embarrassed by what Southwest Airlines did to Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, and our broken hearts go out to our 6th grade sister in the Bronx brutalized for wearing her hijab. We identify with everyone and no one at all.
We are mulatto, mestizo, and multiracial. We are Amerasian and Afroasian, hapa and hybrid. But all of the labels in the world cannot help us spot one another on a train platform or pick friendlies out of a white crowd. We bear no common marks, share neither fatherlands nor mother tongues. We cannot bond over our ethnic meals, euphorically dance to our ethnic music, dress in our traditional ethnic clothing to celebrate our ethnic holidays. We fall between the fibers of our cultural lexicon and of our social fabric.
We are mixed-race folk, and we were homeless before Heidi.
See you at Mixed Remixed this June.
-Michael Maliner, guest blogger
Michael Maliner is a writer and photographer who will be attending the Mixed Remixed Festival for the first time in June 2016. His blog, Tides ‘n’ Tudes, can be found here: www.tidesntudes.com. He will be blogging about our events throughout the the festival. If you want to attend, register here. It’s free!
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