LITLIT Panel: Finding Form

How does an idea go from its start as just a spark to its final form? Finding Form is a conversation between multidisciplinary artists Gabrielle Civil, Tom Comitta, Harry Dodge, and Johanna Hedva, whose work takes them across formats—music, film, performance art, the page. Together, these artists will discuss how point of view is perhaps the most powerful tool for discovering art’s true form, and how they have assembled a sense of craft that lends itself to many modalities.

Join us June 6 + 7 at LITLIT for this and other panels! Held at SCI-Arc, LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair is a free festival celebrating the West Coast Literary Arts, presented by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Learn more about the presses, publishers, and the whole weekend here!

Finding Form will take place on Sunday, June 7, at 3 p.m. at the SCI-Arc Library. This panel is made possible with the support from the Department of Cultural Affairs and The Los Angeles Breakfast Club.

Gabrielle Civil makes performances, writes across art forms, and revels in her secret life. Her recent performances include Black Weirdo School Poetry Club at Crawl Space in LA, Black Weirdo School (Lorde Remix) at the Audre Lorde Symposium in New York, and Jupiter online. She is the author of five performance memoirs, most recently In & Out of Place, about her time living and making art in Mexico. Foundress of the Black Weirdo School, she is co-editor of the forthcoming Migrating Pedagogies anthology. She is developing psychic defense gestures for RESILIENCE, a performance event curated by LACE. Her first solo art show I 🖤 the Library will open at PARTICIPANT Gallery next year. The aim of her work is to open up space. 

Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book, out from Coffee House Press, and People's Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels, the first original fiction published by Columbia University Press. Their poetry books include 〇 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. Comitta's writing has appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, and BAX 2020: Best American Experimental Writing, with two poems appearing in The New Concrete, an international anthology of concrete poetry in the digital age. They live in Los Angeles.

Harry Dodge, an American visual artist and writer whose interdisciplinary practice is characterized by its explorations of relation, materiality, and ecstatic contamination, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. His first book, a work of literary nonfiction entitled My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, was published by Penguin in 2020. Dodge holds an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is permanent faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Program in Art.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing. They are the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good and the novel On Hell. In 2020, they published Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their artwork has been shown internationally at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the L.A. A+D Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennale, and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich, among others. In 2024, they were a Disability Futures Fellow, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2026, they were awarded a USA Fellowship, and listed on ArtReview’s “Power 100” list.