Artist Nguyen Trung’s “Untitled (Tea Vendor)” portrays a seated tea vendor in a cafe with soft, smoky blue-black hues, and is a strong example of the stylistic direction favoured by the Young Vietnamese Artists Association from Saigon. Co-founded by Trung in 1966, the association promised to “follow modern art movements closest to the tendencies that reside in the hearts of our Vietnamese audience.”

For Singaporean writer and poet Lisabelle Tay, whose work blends the personal with the fantastical and the mythic with the mundane, the subtle elements of the painting—a glimpse of the table, the tea vendor, and a luminous white cloth emerging from the darkness—reinforce the power of both painting and poetry to illuminate what is hidden.

Join Tay for a poetry workshop to learn and unlearn ways of “reading” and appreciating “Untitled (Tea Vendor)”.

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What happened was that someone moved in
next door, into the haunted apartment.

She brought only herself — there must have
been bags, few or many, but no vans came,
no men — no hint of furniture whatsoever.

Suddenly in silence she was here
and behind the shared wall we felt her
and before long we breathed back in liturgy.

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It seemed facile that he should be like this now because his father had more than once ripped up his worksheets, when he was a child having coloured outside the lines, and flung the pieces in his face; yet he found himself holding on to the memory, to that thread of contempt held taut between father and son, as if it were something physical he could touch and see—proof that whatever was in his father had also rooted deep within him, taking hideous shape.

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The Black List has named the six projects and seven screenwriters invited to their 2023 Annual Lab. The program, now in its eleventh year, provides creative mentorship and career support to promising feature writers as they further develop their scripts during a weeklong workshop in Ojai, CA.
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MOMO by Lisabelle Tay
When a troubled woman and her doppelgänger fall in love with the same man, their symbiotic relationship unravels with devastating consequences.

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