Half Halt: Screening & Reading

Join Ulises for an intimate evening of film and language with filmmaker Sofia Theodore-Pierce (Ithaca, NY) and writers David Richardson (NYC) and Leigh Gallagher (Philadelphia). 

A gesture to indicate something around the bend, a half halt is a horsemanship term for a slight pulse on the reins–Hey, I’m still here, holding you. In the spirit of this double-sided warning/reassurance, Richardson and Gallagher will read original prose and poetry, followed by a screening of two short films by Theodore-Pierce, “Exterior Turbulence” and “Half Halt.” Anticipate seizure dreams, moon landings, water triptychs, mother voices, and horses, horses, horses. 

About the Contributors:

is a teaching artist and filmmaker. Her nonfiction films balance choreographed engagement with collected ephemera and unrehearsed home movie aesthetics to explore the spaces, bodies, and social structures we inhabit. Her work has been exhibited at festivals and venues such as Irish Film Institute, Alchemy Moving Image, Athens Film & Video Festival, Prismatic Ground, Winnipeg Underground, Edinburgh International, and FRACTO Berlin. In 2024 she was a recipient of a Lighthouse Works Fellowship and a Film/Video Residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Sofia is an Assistant Professor in Cinema at Binghamton University. She lives in Ithaca, NY.

writes prose. Since 2015, he has co-directed the publishing project dispersed holdings. He works and teaches for the Bard Pr*son Initiative, where he is site director of the Taconic campus and a member of the writing faculty. He is also a faculty associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.

is a writer living in Philadelphia. Primarily working in fiction but occasionally playing in murkier genres, her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub, Full Stop, American Short Fiction, Salt Hill, and the anthology Reading Room, as well as in nontraditional print formats through collaborations with artists and musicians. Her first novel, Who You Might Be, was released by Henry Holt in 2022.

Host or Publisher Ray Philly