Tag Archives: Word Up Recirculation

Word Up Recirculation: I’m Working On Something by Handmade for Kids

Saturday, June 28, 2025 – 2:00pm to 3:00pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New YorkNY 10032

register

A free musical performance for children and their families by the Washington Heights band Handmade for KidsI’m Working On Something is an interactive, bilingual, and kinetic show presenting original compositions and songs from the Latin American songbook for children of all ages!

Preview some of the music here.

With flavor, purpose, and joy
To sing, dance, and wonder

Con sabor, propósito y alegría
Para cantar, bailar y maravillarse

Handmade For Kids is a bilingual performance of songs, stories and and beats that make the body move, the mind think, and the imagination wonder.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.


Word Up Recirculation – NYC Book Launch: Nadia Alexis’s BEYOND THE WATERSHED with Cynthia Manick, JP Howard, and Edythe Rodriguez

Friday, June 27, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New YorkNY 10032

register

Word Up welcomes poet and photographer Nadia Alexis to celebrate the NYC launch of her debut collection Beyond the Watershed. Featured in Publishers Weekly’s Spring 2025 Preview, the collection is a hybrid of poetry and photography exploring generational trauma, healing, and reclamation through the experiences of a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother. There will be a poetry reading by Nadia Alexis, Cynthia Manick (No Sweet Without Brine), JP Howard (SAY/MIRROR), and Edythe Rodriguez (We, The Spirits). Join us for a night of poetry, celebration, and community. Books will be available for purchase, and a signing will follow the reading.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

Word Up Recirculation: Improv Workshop and Free Jazz Jam for Players of All Levels (ACMP and Uptown Out)

Saturday, June 21, 2025 – 3:30pm to 6:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New YorkNY 10032

ACMP and Uptown Out present:

The Great Indoor Make Music NY Community Play-In:
Improv workshop and free jazz jam for players of all levels. Featuring Matt Lavelle and The 12 Houses Chamber Ensemble

Saturday, June 21 at Recirculation, a project of Word-Up Books
876 Riverside Drive, NYC

3:30pm Improv workshop with Matt Lavelle, Hilliard Greene and Chris Forbes
5pm play along with The 12 Houses!

Bring your instrument and a music stand

Come and play creative music in a fun, low-pressure environment at one of New York City’s coolest volunteer-run community book store. (Buy some books, too!)

FREE ADMISSION! Sign up here.

Word Up Recirculation – We Are One: A Fundraiser for Make the Road NY

Let’s be the change we wish to see in this world right now. Let’s support a great cause. And let’s meet in person and share time and space together in community. It’s one of the most revolutionary things we can do right now.

Please join me this Saturday, June 14th at Recirculation to join in community and joy as resistance, as survival, as giving thanks. RSVP on this page.

And here’s the great cause: Make the Road New York. MRNY is renowned for its work with immigrants and beyond.

Between merch sales and direct donations we have raised OVER $1,200 SO FAR! I haven’t used social media friends, this has been good ol’ fashioned email and word of mouth and talking in person. Let’s keep it going! Let’s hit $1,500!

If you are able to, please donate here. *Merch sales are closed for now. And if you can’t donate, please come out anyway. Community is vital now more than ever.

What is Make the Road New York?

Make the Road NY builds the power of immigrant and working-class communities to achieve dignity and justice through:

-community organizing

-policy innovation

-transformative education, and

-the provision of high-quality legal and survival services.

In response to the tremendous attacks on immigrants and many other communities, Make the Road NY has been fighting for the end of ICE collaboration with local police in NY state, turning out thousands of New Yorkers to rallies, and launching multiple court cases challenging expedited removal, the end of protected statuses for immigrants, the assault on birthright citizenship, and more.

How do I participate?

Donate any amount directly.

-If you can’t donate right now, please spread the word about this fundraiser and come out this Saturday.

-Connect with Make the Road NY:

-Join me in person to celebrate on Saturday, June 14th. Head here to RSVP.

Event Time & Date

2025-06-14 1:30pm  to

Word Up Recirculation: Book Launch: Ellen Hagan & David Flores’s TELL ME EVERY LIE with Renée Watson

Tuesday, June 24, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New YorkNY 10032

register

Word Up celebrates the launch of local authors Ellen Hagan and David Flores’s Tell Me Every Lie, a moving, layered young adult novel in two voices about finding truth in the lies we tell ourselves. There will be a reading, Q&A, and special guests to celebrate the launch. In conversation with Hagan & Flores will be Renée Watson, author of All the Blues in the Sky.

“A simmering romance in which two recent high school graduates at an elite resort endeavor to reinvent themselves by telling lies-and maybe fall in love. The protagonists remain sympathetic even amid their mutual deceit, while the cozy plot builds to a compassionate, mature, and surprising resolution.” —Publishers Weekly

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

John Paul Reyes wants to escape the worst truths in his life-other people’s pity since his dad died, and everyone else’s expectations about what he should do with his life now that he’s graduated high school. When he arrives at the Majestic Mountain resort with his Tita Abrigo’s wealthy family, he sees a way to escape-he can be JP Abrigo, rich and set, and he can lie his way to feeling fine.

Mia Malik is trapped in this town, working hard at the resort, trying to escape her broken family and to make her way to the prestigious art program she was accepted into. She’s desperate to afford her way there, and she’s sick of the privileged guests who have the whole world open to them, who don’t really even see her.

But then another staffer dares Mia to make one of the guests fall for her. If she can, she’ll collect enough money to get out. Mia knows this is dangerously against the rules, and doesn’t even want to pretend to like an entitled rich kid, but then she meets JP. Lying to him starts off easy, but then there’s more to him than she expected. And the way JP feels about Mia? So real. As their week together runs out, Mia and JP will have to dig themselves out from the lies they tell to see if there’s any truth in the feelings they have for each other.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include: Crowned, Hemisphere, Watch Us Rise (YA collaboration with Renée Watson), Blooming Fiascoes, Reckless, Glorious, Girl, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, All That Shines and Tell Me Every Lie (YA collaboration with David Flores forthcoming from Bloomsbury, Spring 2025). Ellen’s poems and essays can be found in: So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, Creative Nonfiction, Underwired Magazine, She Walks in Beauty, Small Batch, Southern Sin, ESPNW and Oprah Daily. She is the recipient of a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2013 NoMAA Creative Arts Grant and received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. National arts residencies include The Hopscotch House and Louisiana Arts Works. Ellen is Head of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program (founded in partnership with Ambassador Caroline Kennedy) with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines. www.ellenhagan.com @ellenhagan

David Flores is a photographer, filmmaker, and educator. His images can be found on the covers of Poets & Writers, Scalawag, and PLUCK. His work has been showcased at The Kentucky Center, The Verbal Arts Centre of Northern Ireland, and film festivals across the country. In 2018, David began work on “Nueva Bronx: 21st Century Families” — bringing free family portraiture to Railroad Park in the Bronx. This project is his response to recent nationalist movements that have attempted to remove and erase familial representations of immigrants and people of color. David believes that family, in all of its beautiful forms, stands as a cornerstone of the human experience, creating intersections between past, present and future and simultaneously weaving larger connections in the community. David is a regular guest artist of the Digital Age Learning Institute, the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, and the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University. Recent arts residencies include ArtBuilt, Global Writes, Louisiana Arts Works, and the DreamYard Project. David lives in Manhattan with his partner and children.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Her novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King AwardHer books include the Ryan Hart series, Some Places More Than OthersThis Side of HomeWhat Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, cowritten with Ilyasah Shabazz, Watch Us Rise, cowritten with Ellen Hagan, and Love Is a Revolution, as well as acclaimed picture books: Summer Is HereMaya’s SongThe 1619 Project: Born on the Water, written with Nikole Hannah-Jones, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, and Harlem’s Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Renée splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City.