What is an almanac?

The Other Almanac is new addition to the long history of USian almanacs. There have been many different almanacs throughout the last couple hundred years with the Old Farmer’s Almanac being the most widely read.

If The Other Almanac is your introduction to the incredible history of almanacs here in the US and the world, then welcome to a very deep new study. By receiving a copy, you are now taking part in one of the oldest cultural and scientific traditions of humanity.

The first printed almanac was created in Europe in 1457, but almanacs have existed across the globe for much longer, since the discipline of astronomy came into being. They were carved into stones, painted on animal hides, and formed into manuscripts. The oldest surviving almanac was found in Babylonia and like the Tung Shing (Chinese almanac) it lists each day of the year with corresponding favorable and unfavorable activities.

Yearly updated almanacs are still being printed In many countries around the world. 

The Other Almanac is calculated and written for New York State. We will hopefully be expanding geographically in coming years!

Who are these incredible contributors?

10th Floor Studio is the collective work of Jerome Tavé and Kyle Lawson. The two met in 2008 while studying at Savannah College of Art & Design. They combined their personal studio practices in early 2018. Long stints of material experimentation and cross-species exploration have brought fungi to the center of their work. In a time where climate action cannot be ignored, they hope to use their studio practice to contribute to the shift away from anthropocentric narratives.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music, and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship, and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination, and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck, and a developing musical ritual.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Black feminist scholar and writer and an aspirational cousin to all life. Alexis is the author of several books, most recently Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She lives in Durham, NC.

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect and filmmaker who lives in New York.

Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American artist living and working in Cairo, NY. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology, and sexuality. She was the inaugural AIR for the 2023 Pocantico Prize, a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2019 Kindle Project Makers Muse Award recipient.

Andrea Aliseda is a food and culture writer and vegan recipe developer and dog mom based in Brooklyn, NY currently working on her debut plant-based Mexican cookbook. Find her on instagram at @andrea__aliseda and Substack at: andreaaliseda.substack.com.

Bill McKibben is an author, educator, and environmentalist, who helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and who has recently helped found Third Act, an organization that builds a progressive organizing movement for people over the age of 60.

Bread and Puppet Press prints images chiseled in masonite by Peter Schumann, founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater. The press, founded by Elka Schumann, makes all the hand-printed and painted items for sale and produces printed work for theater performances. Our emphasis is on utilitarian uses of art, for such vital activities as celebration, decoration, information, argumentation, rumination, and puppetry!

Carla J Simmons holds an associates degree in Positive Human Development and Social Change. She works to embody the responsibilities of this degree through art and journalism, while representing her community in the most authentic way possible.

Chloë Boxer writes fiction and makes television. She has stories in Joyland, DIAGRAM, and The Michigan Quarterly Review.

Chris Lloyd (b. 1994, Albuquerque, NM) is a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. “In Solitude Until The End of Time” presents Lloyd’s largest-scale works to date. Layers of tactility expand across works that are suspended in shadow boxes and hung as ‘scrolls’ along the walls. His practice builds in watercolor, sewing, architectural pin-plotting, laser engraving, and collage, imbuing personal narrative and storytelling in his constructions. Recent shows include “Two Birds, One Stone,” Gern En Regalia, 2020, and a subsequent solo booth at NADA NY with the same in 2022. Recent group shows include “At the Center Of My Ironic Faith”, Cassandra Cassandra, Toronto, Canada 2021, “Everyday Secrets,” Luce Gallery, Torino, Italy, 2021, and “The Swamp Show,” Mundus Press, Northern Massachusetts, 2021. 

Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976, Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. Her practice, strongly rooted in painting and beadwork, extends into sculpture, installation, video, and performance, reflecting upon cross-cultural experiences through the amalgamation of influences from Lakota and Euro/American abstraction. White Hawk was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent awards include Anonymous Was a Woman, Academy of Arts and Letters, United States Artists, and others.

Dylan Smith’s work appears in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Chestnut Review, Bending Genres, and other literary places on the internet. He also reads fiction submissions for X-R-A-Y Lit, writes a monthly fiction column for Farewell Transmission, and plants flowers on rooftops in Brooklyn for money. Find him on Twitter @dylan_a_smith

Daniel Barreto (b. 1991) is an artist based in México City who has a diverse range of creative talents including animation, film, visuals, murals, music, and design. In 2016, Daniel received his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/TUFTS in Boston.

Esther Elia (she/her) received a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts and an MFA in Painting/Drawing from the University of New Mexico. Her art practice focuses on the Assyrian experience in diaspora, and uses painting and sculpture to explore themes of creating homeland and culture as a currently stateless nation. She uses storytelling as a tool for decolonization and community healing, and collects contemporary Assyrian histories as a salve to the Western institutional canon and its hyper-focus of Assyrians solely within their ancient context.

Food with Fam is a community built on reciprocity and reimagining our relationship to food and one another. Since our birth at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have aimed to build a sustainable model of produce distributions and culinary programming that not only provides nourishment and sustenance to disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout New York City, but creates long-lasting trust and connections that can become a vehicle for greater health and collaboration amongst New Yorkers.

Francesca DiMattio makes sculptures inspired by the domestic. Looking at the history of porcelain, she shifts how we are used to seeing the decorative. Polite and sweet designs become rogue and powerful. She collapses time and space making new hybrids that question fixed notions of beauty, femininity, and cultural hierarchies.

Hangama Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015-2016). Amiri works predominantly in textiles to examine notions of home, as well as how gender, social norms, and larger geopolitical conflict impact the daily lives of women, both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora.

Hannah Beerman is a person and a painter and keeps learning things the hard way. She was born in 1992 in Nyack, NY and, as of this printing, does not believe in ghosts. She went to Bard for her BA and Hunter for MFA.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. The author of five full-length poetry collections, her latest novel RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and as a National Together We Read Library Pick, and was featured on CBS Morning. Her novel TRINITY SIGHT won the Southwest Book Award.

Jessie Kindig is the editor of Vole Prochaine, a zine of writing by animals for animals.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

Kirk Gordon is a designer, landscape architect, and tallgrass prairie native with a background in zoology and plant biology. He is currently based in Brooklyn, where he can be found hoarding native plants in his backyard.

Keegan Dakkar Lomanto is a multi-disciplinary artist, born in New York City, 1990.

Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri is an industrial designer and eco-futurist whose practice is aimed at public engagement, ecological equity, and joy. Her work addresses emerging climates and conditions of cities specifically pertaining to clean water, food sovereignty, fresh air, and green space. Through the construction of ecosystemic tools, material experimentation, collaborations, and installations, she responds to the ecological circumstances we are collectively contending with.

Philip Poon is a registered architect based in New York City. His practice explores the contemporary American condition, in particular the architectural and spatial expressions of the Asian-American experience.

Sophia Giovannitti is an artist and author who lives in New York.

Tania Willard of Secwepemc Nation and settler heritage, is an artist, curator, and assistant professor in visual arts at UBC Okanagan, Syilx territories. Her work as a curator and artist has been shown nationally with curated exhibitions of note at Vancouver Art Gallery, Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, the Museum of Anthropology UBC, Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Landmarks 2017 in National Parks across Turtle Island. Willard’s ongoing collaborative project BUSH gallery is a land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges in her home territories of Secwepemcúl̓ecw.

Tyrrell Tapaha is a 6th generation Diné weaver and sheepherder based in the Four Corners.

Veladya Chapman is an herbalist, living and homesteading in rural Georgia with her partner, Matt, and three-year-old daughter, Aura. Amongst herbalism, Veladya studies and teaches breathwork, entheogens, womb wisdom, and holistic nutrition. Her heart is expanded by guiding others towards elevated ways of being.

Who Tattoo AKA Joji Sanabria is a queer Puerto Rican tattoo artist based in San Francisco, CA. His style of tattooing is acid traditional—often colorful, weird, playful, and cute.

Yaku Perez Guartambel is a Kichwa-Kañari lawyer, scholar, and water defender. He has spent the last three decades defending Indigenous rights to self-determination and water systems in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. Yaku, who authored eight books, has been criminalized for defending water, tortured, jailed, and a victim of assassination attempts. In 2018 he was elected governor of the province of Azuay, and in 2021/2023 he ran for presidential office.