PANEL: “Race & Arts & Politics”
Location: UC Theater
Krystal Languell "On the Structure of Belladonna Collaborative: Collaboration and negotiation of the editorial process via non-hierarchical, author-centered, anti-capitalist, anti-racist practices"
Kirsten Ortega: “What Audre Lorde’s Body Teaches Us: Imagining New Pedagogies of Race and Poetry”
John Hyland: “Sonic Performances of Radical Blackness”
Michel Valentin: “Hybridity/Territoriality/De-Territorialization: Zones and Fluxes in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil”
Alicia Mountain: "Queer Mooring and Un-Mooring: Racialized Erotic Tourism in Woolf’s Orlando"
Rachel Mindell: "Cutting Ties: The Deeply Wounded in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven."
Panel on writing about race, identity, and exploratory ideas.
Anna Caroline Harris: “Light, Bright, and Damn (-Near) White: A Poetry Reading and Conversation on Authority and Authenticity”
Joyce Maxwell: "Shoelace" Reading/movement presentation
Charlene Choi: "Writing and the Pursuit of the Unnameable Core"
Leisa Greene Nelson: Personal Essay
Kendra Potter: Personal Essay
What happens when you articulate disenfranchised grief? What is lost and born? How do you perform an exorcism on yourself through writing? Movement, shake medicine: "I want to dance the shame from my body." How do you write an origin story when there isn't one? What if the origin has been erased? There is no path back, yet you search anyway and end up discovering ancestral roots, the drumming heard deep in the rainforest: "In the jungle there is a foreboding that surrounds a sentence." The ancestral line loops back not to the beginning of one's life nor just before, but rather to the primordial. Orality. But what if you have been stripped from language? What happens when language fails to encapsulate lived experience? What happens when all you have left is "the body to articulate loss" (Sarita Echavez See)? Subversive assimilation? Interested in cross cultural (re)connections, what begins as a suturing of bodies, as an exploration of liminal identities, language and citizenship, becomes something performative. Whether on the page or through movement and multimedia, all the participants work at the intersections of writing and performance art.
Recently, at Naropa University, Claudia Rankine said that “shame is a condition of dignity.” I think that quote speaks to microaggressions, which lead to disenfranchised grief. That idea that we can’t speak or that if we do, we’ll be harassed. We feel ashamed for not speaking, but also for speaking. We also feel ashamed when we have the chance to speak and find we have no words. So how do we as writers and artists create the space to explore it?
Mary Ann Bonjorni, Moderator
Heejoo Gwen Kim
Rochelle Kulei
Lisa Jarrett
Ricardo Dominguez
Lucas de Lima: "Technoshamanism"
Gregory Laynor: "'Another Kind of Love': Queer Intermedia and Race"
Eunsong Kim
Poets Ailish Hopper, Blas Falconer, Metta Sáma and Orlando White will read selections from their work and will offer comprehensive advice on how to approach their work (and other work that speaks directly to race, ethnicity, nation, tribe, sexuality, class) in the classroom. This will be, primarily, an interactive conversation amongst practitioners of charged innovative writing who are professors interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to teaching.
Who’s Hump? : Comics-Poetics and the Racial Imaginary
A collaborative multi-media comix-poetry event featuring a reading from Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry script The Trouble with Humpadori with audio-visual components from Bishakh Som’s graphic illustrations of the work. Discussion about Hindu gods, comics, animation, collaboration, gender, and minstrelsy.
John Keene
Tisa Byrant
Sherwin Bitsui
Dorothy Wang
The various intellectual interests of the faculty at UGA, which include Native American
Studies, Jazz, the work of James Baldwin, and Early American Literature, have made it
possible to foster serious conversations about race and aesthetics within the Creative Writing Doctoral Program. This panel will showcase the program’s breadth of disciplinary and aesthetic approaches.
PRESENTERS:
1) LeAnne Howe: “Race and American Indians: A reading.”
Abstract: LeAnne Howe will read from Choctalking on Other Realities, one part tragedy, one
part absurdist fiction, one part marvelous realism, a tribalography on race: "Today, Arabs in
keffiyehs have replace images of Plains Indians fighting the US Cavalry. The fact that Arabs
identify with Indians and not John Wayne isn't surprising. We've both been enemies of the
United States."
Bio: LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) writes fiction, poetry, plays and scholarship that deal with
Native experiences. She’s received American Book Award, Tulsa Library Literary Award, a
2012 USA Artist Ford Fellowship, and Fulbright Scholarship, among others. She’s the
Eidson Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, Athens.
2) Ed Pavlic: A Poetry Reading
Abstract: Pavlic will read work from his newest book, Let's Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno
(National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015 – Judge, John Keene).
Bio: Professor of English and Creative Writing, ED PAVLIĆ’S newest books are Let's Let
That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015), Visiting Hours at the
Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear
Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). Others works include Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minnesota Press, 2002), and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).
Among his current projects are two book-length manuscripts concerning the life and work
of James Baldwin: “‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: Black Music and James Baldwin’s
Political Aesthetic,” and “No Time to Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to His Brother
David.”
3) Magdalena Zurawski, Cultivating Territory: Imaginary and Real Removal in Margaret
Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes
Abstract: In this talk I consider Summer on the Lakes, Margaret Fuller’s travel narrative from
1843, as an example of literary cultivation in the service of American expansionism. Placing
Fuller within the context of the British aesthetic tradition of the picturesque, I read her
extensive citations of Wordsworth within her travel narrative as a transformation and
continuation of the English eighteenth-century aesthetic practice, which enabled a rising
middle-class to “possess” English land through the development of literary and painterly
sensibilities. Fuller’s adoption of the picturesque, I show, enables her own literary cultivation
to mediate an imaginary and subjective possession of formerly Indian land and thus serves as a psychological means of expanding real national territory. I argue that Fuller’s extension of European literary tradition into an American sphere as expressed through the excessive
literary citations within the text aestheticizes her encounters with native Americans and
permits her to imagine her encounters as an expansion of poetic tradition rather than as a
hostile political act. Fuller’s dependence upon Wordsworth’s poetry and German literary
sources in order to mediate her quasi-colonial position in formerly native territories presents
a compelling example of intellectual cultivation in service of New World expansionism.
Bio: Magdalena Zurawski joined UGA's English faculty in the Fall of 2013. Her novel The
Bruise was published in 2008 by FC2/University of Alabama Press. It received both a 2008
Lambda Award and the 2007 Ronald Sukenick-American Book Review Innovative Fiction
Prize. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and completed her
PhD in American Literature at Duke University in 2013. Litmus Press will be publishing her
poetry collection Companion Animal in the Fall of 2014.
4) Shamala Gallagher, reading form Mooncalf, a fabulist non-fiction essay
Abstract: I will read from my nonfiction manuscript Mooncalf, a lyric address to Caliban that
shifts among creative and critical genres in its search for an understanding of "otherness."
Bio: Shamala Gallagher's poetry has appeared in VOLT, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel,
Timber, The Offending Adam, Word For/Word, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States, and elsewhere. Her chapbook I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2015. She received her BA from Stanford University and her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin, and she is currently a first-year PhD student at the University of Georgia.
5) Gabrielle Fuentes, reading from Settler’s Point
Abstract: My novel in progress, "Settler's Point," examines the insidious divisions of race and class on a religious commune in rural Northern Wisconsin during the Great Depression. Set against the backdrop of the Dust Bowl, Prohibition, and rising KKK violence, "Settler's
Point" explores a community seemingly living outside of racial boundaries and yet founded
on segregation and racial violence.
Bio: Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is from Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in One Story, Western Humanities Review, Pank, The Collagist, Tweed’s,
NANO Fiction, The Yoke, SpringGun, and elsewhere. She received her BA from Brown
University and her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently a PhD
candidate in the Creative Writing Program at UGA.
Native American Paranormal Society (NAPS) is a view into the present paranormal craze. Ghosts and Spirits have existed in Euro-American literature since Greek comedies to Shakespeare. Spirituality is a strong theme in some Native American literature as well. YellowRobe takes a look as to when those who are at rest and who are at peace are disturbed by the arrogance of the living. Set in an abandoned Bingo Hall/Casino, the current residents are those who have lost their lives within the Bingo Hall/ Casino. This is a long one-act play.
There will be no intermission.
Understanding Native Tribal Identity through Native Drama: A panel discussion of the plays of Assiniboine playwright, William S. YellowRobe
Chair: David L. Moore, University of MontanaKatie Kane, University of Montana: “Better-n-Indians: A Reading” [title to be revised]
Margo Lukens, University of Maine: “Art That Works: William YellowRobe’s Star Quilter as Open Letter”
George Price, University of Montana: “Afrophobia in Native American History: Reflections on William S. YellowRobe's Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers”
Respondent: William S. YellowRobe
Abstracts:
1) David L. Moore, as chair, will briefly offer a context for the panel and introduce the panelists.
2) Katie Kane, University of Montana
“Better-n-Indians: A Reading” [title to be revised]
Katie Kane, professor of English at the University of Montana, will read William S. YellowRobe’s formally innovative and thematically anti-colonial play, “Better-n-Indians,” drawing on interviews she did with Mr. YellowRobe during the late stages of production of the play. In addition, Mr. YellowRobe’s relationship of affiliation and distance from the plays of Luis Valdez and dramaturgy of Oskar Eustas will be explored.
3) Margo Lukens, University of Maine
“Art That Works: William YellowRobe’s Star Quilter as Open Letter”
In the context of Claudia Rankine’s calling out of unexamined racism in contemporary American art, and of art’s failure to make us confront and think creatively in response to racism, the importance of reading plays by William Yellow Robe is undeniable.
In “The Star Quilter” William YellowRobe examines racism with the absolute clarity that his audience might include anyone—from Assiniboine people to Native Americans and African Americans to white Anglo protestant people like myself—and everyone in between. No surprise there—like Rankine, YellowRobe lives the experience of an American of color, where one is responsible for being aware of many perspectives outside one’s own.
YellowRobe’s play depicts four private encounters between Mona Gray, a traditional Assiniboine star quilter modeled on YellowRobe’s mother, Mina Rose Forest YellowRobe, and Luanne Jorgensen, a wealthy and politically “well-connected” Montana rancher’s wife. YellowRobe’s work of art, aimed at public performance, makes public a private exchange mirroring so many private exchanges that have taken place between white and Native American people—in a way that shows the intricacy of racist behavior and self justification, and illuminates for his audience the complexity of possible responses to unexamined racist behavior. YellowRobe’s depiction gives all the participants (readers, actors, audience members) a chance to walk a while in someone else’s shoes, and to try on attitudes in a safe way. This immersion in a moment of art (a poem, a song, a scene from a play or story) is different from taking the stance of academic argument that too often aligns with one’s most rigid preconceived notions. Even reading aloud—giving breath to words from the page and hearing how they sound coming from one’s own mouth—is a way of trying on the pain or fear or courage or questioning of another person’s experience.
I will argue (from experience) that the Assiniboine aesthetic informing YellowRobe’s work provides a model for the work art could be doing, and an exemplum of the change we all need to learn to make.
4) George Price, University of Montana
“Afrophobia in Native American History: Reflections on William S. YellowRobe Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers”
The popular concept of “race theory,” as a way of explaining human diversity, was unknown among indigenous peoples of the Americas before European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Shortly after the U.S. confiscation of Native American lands west of the Mississippi River, the creation of the reservation system, and the arrival of millions of racist Euro-Americans to live in close proximity to, and some cases actually on, the Indian Reservations, Afrophobia and other racial concepts began to filter into Native American social discourse and experience. William YellowRobe’s play, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, sheds much light upon this historic occurrence as it played out in one Northern Plains tribe in the 20th century, along with its aftereffects and ongoing challenges. I plan to comment on this history and how it is illuminated in this play, along with the consequences and current issues related to it. One question that I hope to explore is how and why did the Buffalo Soldiers come to represent all African Americans in the minds of many Native people of Northern Plains tribes, and how much of that perception was based on their actual interactions with African Americans, as opposed to hearsay and general allegations?
5) William S. YellowRobe as respondent, will comment on the papers, the plays, and the themes of the panel.
Jimmy Kendall: Decentering White Authority: Teaching Ferguson as a Rhetorics of Inclusion
Joyce Maxwell: Raced Fear: Real and Imagined
Quan Ha: Imperialist Nostalgia in Andrew Lam's Vietnamese American short story 'Slingshot'
Casey Charles: Queer Intersections in Baldwin's Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems
Ari Laurel: Teaching Solidarity
David Witzling: “Postmodern Prose and the Discourse of the “Cultural Jew”: The Cases of Mailer and Foer”
Janelle Adsit: "Finding the Other’s Voice: Race, Institution, and Will Alexander’s Poetics”
Jane Wong: “Continuing the 'MFA vs. POC' Conversation”
This panel considers the way whiteness participates in the racial dynamics of contemporary American poetry. As Toni Morrison assures an interviewer, we are all "raced." But what does that mean for white writers who have written with whiteness as their background, white on white? Markers of whiteness are deeply embedded into the expectations that govern how a thing or a person should be composed, into notions of legibility. Where do white writers’ choices implicitly or explicitly reveal how the writers are raced? How do decisions about subject or process impact poets of color? Presenters will engage with specific aspects of what happens as the white subject position becomes racialized. Presenters will discuss the topic through close readings, interrogations of personal work, creative erasure, and socio-historical reviews. This includes notions of anger as held against people of color, anxiety around the term “racist” as an adjective versus a noun, and an exploration of white male poets dragging the dominant lyric into a mode of interiority at a time when minority voices were gaining authority from an expanding speaker position.
STATEMENT OF MERIT
The full context of the Toni Morrison interview shows her responding to accusations of being preoccupied by race, and to “concerns” that she only writes about black subject matters. This highlights the problem of whiteness being somehow excluded from racial configurations, or, more to the point, the problem of race being recognized topically as an explicit social or political category and not by the micro-tendencies and residual effects of structuring (literary) perception on a white and euro-centric legacies. Beyond self-announcing efforts at incorporating race into a poetic project, how can race be made visible—through affective stances, tonal contours, procedural decisions? White poets have historically seemed unconcerned with race, though their indifference does not mean that their poetry does make statements about race. Where racial aspects of white have been discounted or under-investigated, this panel seeks to make interventions.
(Presentation will be from 9:00-9:30)
Presenter bio: Geneva Chao has recently proposed the torus (a surface of revolution in continual motion around its coplanar axis) as a metaphor for the Asian American writing community. This happened at the California Institute for Integral Studies’ Conference “From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant-Garde” in August 2014 in San Francisco, where she also read from the creative work “A Comprehensive History of Asian Americans.” Her critical piece on Don Mee Choi’s translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry will appear from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in November. Her poems and translations have appeared in various places, including New American Writing and The L.A. Telephone Book, vol. 2, and she teaches writing in Los Angeles. genevachao@gmail.com
Presentation/performance: Solo piece entitled “Where’s Wanda: Writers of Color, the Unconcious Quota System, and Our Inadequate Imaginings.” Sesshu Foster’s recent blog post discussing the “Made in L.A.” art exhibit at UCLA’s Hammer Museum lamented that there were not more artists of color in that event and in the city in general, saying “so it’s okay, because “black los angeles” had its day/it had the one exhibit/it has black history month every year/it had wanda coleman (in those days).” At almost the same moment, NYC poet Jennifer Tamayo posted the following Facebook status update: “A DECISION'S BEEN MADE: if your NYC reading event has more than 2 people in it and all of them are white, i'm not going.” This creative talk/performance will explore the ways in which “checking the POC box” by including a small minority of POC writers and artists may make an event or community feel “integrated,” while both ghettoizing and pigeonholing the minority writer, who is then forced to be the token minority and to “represent” (through acquiescence to or rejection of) others’ racial imaginings. Wanda Coleman, beloved “unofficial poet laureate,” was an example of this -- her name was a mantra reassuring you that Los Angeles poetry was not all white -- the way the presence of a tiny minority of writers of color in a community serves to maintain their ghettoization. Through research, discussion of critical race theory, and imagined dialogues, this piece will both educate and enrage its audience.
Reflecting on experiences of feminists of color in academia, this panel explores the politics and poetics of intersectionality in identity (re)formations fractured through innovative texts. Its participants will speak in tongues of split consciousness, polyphonic voices, and “fracturations,” i.e. fractured social liminalities and / or fracturing of institutional power and privilege via resistance. The panel may include readings of microessays, experimental poetry, or hybrid media projects.
As I contemplated the intersections of creativity and identity politics in academia, the concept for “Fracturations” germinated in response to invitations by dominant culture members to speak about my experiences as “an Asian female professor.” Of course, my issues with the question itself -- in the contexts presented, i.e. positions of institutional and racial or gender privilege vs. my token "otherness" -- were multifarious. I leave it up to the audience and panelists to fill in the blanks with your own avocations, your own agency to name yourselves and present your identities and avocations to the world through innovative texts that cross boundaries – not only within academia but outside it, as well.
A panel exploring the intersections, challenges, and realities in narrative realism and in storytelling through oral histories, filmmaking, and documentary film, in particular. Screening of excerpted films by Lorna Lowe and Brooke Swaney. Katie Kane will be discussing oral histories gathered in Haiti for the Voices of Witness Project (McSweeney's). David Witzling will moderate.
Jess Row
David Greenberg
Ailish Hopper
Joy Katz
Claudia Rankine
Beth Loffreda
(Sandra Lim, Jess Row, Bhanu Kapil et al. several more writers + ten)
Borders and Tongues: How Translation Fractals Race
How does our understanding and experience of race factor into the decisions we make as translators? How do culturally specific ideas about race exponentially complicate the cross-cultural and cross-language interactions and interventions translation entails?
And how does translation (as a reading practice or a creative practice) fractal our thinking about race, usefully undermining the comfortable or uncomfortable categories that are constructed by cultures, pedagogies, histories? How are our ideas about race changed in the intimate process of writing from inside another person’s language, of thinking from inside the architecture of another person’s syntax?
This hybrid panel/reading—comprised of Jen Hofer (moderator and presenter, representing the language justice and language experimentation collective Antena), John Keene, and James Thomas Stevens—explores the interactions and intersections of translation and race. We are interested in thinking about how race informs the work we do as translators, both in terms of our aesthetic and political approach to the practice, and in terms of questions of audience, reception, the relationship between departing and arriving languages, who we choose to translate, and the wide array of complexities that occur in the transposition of context that translation entails.
Each of us will present briefly on questions most central to our own thinking about the complex multi-directional inflections of race and translation, referencing specific work we've translated or ideas around translation that are present in our creative work. Then, each of us will give a brief reading/performance that reflects the work or ideas referenced in our presentations. We intend to activate both theory and practice, and to leave ample time for questions and conversation, as this is a topic that is rarely discussed and we are eager to hear impressions from other colleagues.
Marilyn Chin
Ofelia Zepeda
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
In the tradition of a signifying, fisted head-nod protest groove comes "HEROES ARE GANG LEADERS," a group of poets and musicians formed by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and his frequent collaborator Saxophonist James Brandon Lewis after the death of legendary poet/activist Amiri Baraka (2014) to resurrect the matrimony of Black Literary Art and Music as medicine, battle cry, dirge, and the struggle for pleasure.
Janice Lowe (Piano/Voice)
James Brandon Lewis (Saxophone)
Luke Stewart (Bass)
Ailish Hopper (Poet)
Randall Horton (Poet)
Margaret Morris (Voice)
Ryan Frazier (Trumpet)
Thomas Sayers Ellis (Head Hegro-in-Charge)
Bios
Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room (Graywolf 2005) and Skin, Inc: Identify Repair Poem (Graywolf 2010). His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Nation, Poetry, Paris Review, Tin House, Transition and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010 and 2015). He is currently a Visiting Writer at the University of Montana.
James Brandon Lewis is a saxophonist and composer earning a Bachelors from Howard University, and Master of Fine arts degree from California Institute of the Arts. Ebony Magazine hailed james as one of seven jazz musicians to watch in today's scene. His second Album "Divine Travels " was released by historic imprint Okeh records via Sony and features William Parker, Gerald Cleaver, and TSE.
Ailish Hopper is the author of Dark~Sky Society (2014), selected by David St. John as runner up for the New Issues prize, and the chapbook Bird in the Head (2005), selected by Jean Valentine for the Center for Book Arts Prize. Individual poems have appeared in Agni, APR, Blackbird, Harvard Review Online, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tidal Basin Review, and other places. Her essays on art and literature that deal with race have appeared in or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Pilot Light, The Volta, and the anthology, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. She's received support from the MacDowell Colony, Maryland State Arts Council, and Yaddo, and teaches at Goucher College.
Multi-instrumentalist Luke Stewart is “One of the hardest working Creative Musicians in DC.” - Twins Jazz. Luke has performed with the legendary saxophonist Marshall Allen with Danny Ray Thompson, both seminal members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. He also performed with notable creative jazz musicians Ernest Dawkins, Lewis Barnes, Joseph Bowie, and Adam Rudolph. Other notable collaborations include performances with David Ornette Cherry, Ras Moshe, Khan Jamal, Jason Kao Hwang, James Brandon Lewis, Tom Zlabinger, William Parker, Elliott Levin, Abiodun Oyewale of the Last Poets, Tatsuya Nakatani, Daniel Carter, William Hooker, Anthony Pirog, Susan Alcorn, Federico Ughi, Max Johnson, and Bill Cole. His regular ensembles include Trio OOO with drummer Sam Lohman, and legendary DC Free Jazz saxophonist Aaron Martin. He is a founder of Union Arts DC, a collective space for artists in Washington, DC, and regularly presents challenging performances of Jazz and Avant Garde music through CapitalBop and his own “Creative Music” series.
Margaret Morris is a vocalist and improvisor who integrates her backgrounds in classical operatic and extended vocal techniques. She is a longtime collaborator with Chicago based choreographer J’Sun Howard. In 2013 she co-founded NYC based women’s choral and improvisation a capella ensemble LushTongue with Onome. Onome and Margaret performed under the moniker Inner Child, a collaborative, multi-disciplinary performance trio with Keisha Turner at Chicago and NYC venues including Links Hall and Wow Cafe Theater. Margaret was featured in The Exponential experimental album Encuentro with Ben Perkins and Brian Murray with whom she performed throughout 2011-2012. Margaret worked as a choreographer in Chicago where she was honored to be a Chicago Dancemakers Forum LAb Artist, a Link-Up resident artist with Links Hall, and collaborate with local dance artists including Asimina Chremos, Ni'ja Whitson, Angela Gronroos, Ayako Kato, and Erika Wilson Perkins. Her practices of contact improvisation and authentic movement continue to inform her work.
Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award and most recently a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Randall is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press in the publisher of his latest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy. Randall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven.
Janice Lowe is a New York City-based composer and poet. Her works for musical theatre include Langston & Zora, text by Charles Drew (Wild Project,) Lil Budda, text by Stephanie L. Jones and Sit-In at the Five & Dime, text by Marjorie Duffield (New Harmony Project.) Lil Budda received a developmental residency from the Eugene O’Neil Musical Theater Conference and was shown at the National Alliance for Musical Theater's Festival of New Musicals with Anika Noni Rose and Anika Larson in lead roles. She is composer and librettist of the opera Dusky Alice. She has created original music for plays including 12th and Clairmont by Jenni Lamb and Door of No Return by Nehassaiu deGannes. She is librettist of Little Bird Loose, a song cycle collaboration with composer Nils Olaf Dolven. Her music-text collaborations have been performed at numerous venues including La Mama, Etc., Irondale Arts, Ars Nova, College of Staten Island, Ohio Theater, The Duplex, Dixon Place, Barrington Stage, MOCADA Museum, House of Tribes, Vineyard Theater, Stage Left Chicago and Case Western Reserve University. She was a recipient of a Dramatists Guild Jonathan Larson Fellowship. Her poems have been published in journals including Callaloo, The Hat and American Poetry Review. She has taught poetry writing and songwriting workshops in schools and community programs in New York City and Cleveland. She holds an MFA from New York University and is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective.
Ryan T. Frazier is a musician, writer, and physicist based in Philadelphia. As a musician, he has been a contributor to Philadelphia's free jazz and afro-futurist punk scenes for almost a decade. He has performed or recorded with a wide range of musicians and artists, from the underground hiphop/punk band Mighty Paradocs, to renowned poets Sonia Sanchez and Thomas Sayers Ellis, and principle free jazz bassist William Parker. With his own band, Napoleon Dolomite, his musical approach is built from the mathematics of Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy, along with those of Wu Tang Clan and MF Doom, set in a rhythmic and free cosmic sound vision. Studying music and jazz culture/tradition with the great Donald Byrd as a teenager, he is currently an apprentice in the Sun Ra Arkestra, studying under its legendary director, Marshall Allen. Having studied African and African American literature at Hampton University, his current research focuses on the energy dynamics of human culture, using language and the culture of bebop to build a model of the cosmos, its function, composition, and origin. He has taught music at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, in Oakland, CA, as well as in Philadelphia correctional institutions.
Tickets are sold through MAM (for the single event) or through registration for the conference via Thinking Its Presence Conference: http://cas.umt.edu/tip/raceandcreativewriting/
Ailish Hopper: "Impossible Beings: Poetry, Time-Travel, and the Death of White Supremacy."
Benedicte Boisseron: “'Bad Dog!' Race and Dogs from the Plantation to Michael Vick”
Ruth Vanita: “Precolonial Modernity in India: The Example of Cosmopolitan Lucknow"
Vanessa Place: "Playing Divya Victor’s Race Card"
Title: Why KA? FP
Description:
The panelists will read representative samples of poetry by contemporary Korean American female poets and open the forum by saying something startling and potentially offensive. The panelists will then discuss issues including the function of old tales then and now, where they saw themselves in the literature as child writers, how to write good poems, I, and ignoring the ignorable.
Statement of Merit:
This panel concerns the growing body of literature by Korean American female poets. All of a sudden, we’re everywhere. Today, for example, Poetry magazine sent one of us a check for $500 for the Frederick Bock Prize, though it was intended for Frances Choi, who may be another Korean American female poet. In spite of our growing visibility, there have been very few literary conference panels devoted to this topic, perhaps none. We believe we can start a thoughtful conversation, which we will generously open up to the audience.
The merit proposed in this conversation comes from the sense that the racial imaginary differs in every individual, and it is our collective imaginaries that make up a more public imaginary of our time. In addition, our imaginaries are personal, as our imaginaries take our personal history (including our reading) and, in our public work, transform experience into poetry. Poetry is an act of faith in language and in person. In the case of these two writers, we witness a lifetime of experience touching on racial matters, and a lifetime of poetic exploration from and within this experience. If one finds merit in the primary works of these two poets, and in their honest exploration of their own experience and issues, and if one finds merit in the nature of poetic transformation, then merit will be found in this conversation.
In addition, these two friends are excited to embrace a new possibility for their relationship, as one black man from California and one white man now living in Texas, question themselves and each other. This is drama, live and unfettered. It invites your witness, and your participation.
The title of the conference is “THINKING ITS PRESENCE.” What we propose is the
immediate presence of thinking about the primary issue of this conference, thinking
through history, through poetry, and through poetics; thinking in real time.
This past year, a Junot Diaz article in The New Yorker ("MFA vs POC") and a subsequent NPR article ("In Elite MFA Programs, the Struggle of Writing While 'Other'") helped give new life to an ongoing conversation about race, representation, and access to the resources and opportunities the MFA often provides. The latter piece tracked the experiences of several Iowa Writers Workshop alumna from skeptical-acceptees-and-frustrated-students to successful-authors-and-now-faculty-at-their-alma-mater, expressing determination to change the program's racial landscape, from the bodies in the room to the undertones of career advice and workshop discussion. The piece did not, however, acknowledge the rise of the Creative Writing PhD as a prerequisite for such faculty positions, especially for job candidates of color, who are systematically required to be "twice as good to get half as much" in every professional field. In light of this--and foregrounding our agreement that it is imperative that student and faculty demographics in doctoral programs reflect the growing diversity of many higher education institutions--this panel specifically interrogates the curricular experience that attends the PhD's "professionalization" of writers for academic careers.
In other words: How, and to what degree, do doctoral course offerings support the writers of color that these programs claim to value? Furthermore: If doctoral programs that do recruit underrepresented students also require/offer courses that reinforce the notion of Eurocentric Whiteness as the voice and locus of literary authority, what implicit message does this send to writers of color about the market, field, and institutions that await them? This panel presents for discussion the results of a crowdsourced survey of more than 20 Creative Writing PhD programs' course syllabi, privileging the following qualitative and quantitative concerns:
We propose to look at the Fall 2014 semester in particular, a small but relevant sample size that is meant as a starting point for a broader, deeper, and more direct conversation with Creative Writing PhD programs than we’ve seen before.
Event Description: On the Poetics of Anguish, Gender, and Variant Constructions
Can violence, the bifurcation/trifurcation of gender, and the line speak to impossibilities of saying and arrival? Is monstrosity’s fluidity and multiplicity contained in a poetry’s body? Do the pathways of grammar, our variant/queer/violent/diasporic sentences/lines/sounds–reflect the risks and failures of our experiments? In this conversation, Ching-In Chen, Bhanu Kapil, Soham Patel and Mg Roberts investigate gender and its constant relation to a non-resolution and to anguish by exploring the self’s push against structures of possibility, grammar, and the body itself. Moderator: Mg Roberts.
A literary reading by Sandra Lim, Jennifer Tseng, and Solmaz Sharif.
TITLE: Shifting Authenticities: Play in the Face Of…
“Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of
certain defeat.” Ralph Ellison’s 1952 articulation of the structure (and psychology) of some
aspects of the American racial imaginary is both comic and, though painful, fun. The novel’s
absurdist humor is, in part, dependent on the irrational logic of the racial. We imagine the
space for “fun” is won (or earned) largely through labor, through work. Work hard, play
hard, the saying goes. What is the work of the racial imaginary? What are the forms of play
that animate (and subvert) the (il)logic of the racial?
This panel will combine critical inquiry, performances, and readings in considering the
operative force of humor and serious play in the poetics of Amiri Baraka, Wanda Coleman,
and American others. What is fun in the literary and performative? How do artists play
around with shifting modalities of representation, authenticity, and authority? How are
attempts to administer identity and meaning subverted and reconfigured in literature and
performance? How do these writers (the writers being celebrated and the writers
celebrating) engage in unadministered fun?
This panel will explore the indispensible nature of humor and fun in both navigating and
subverting structures that operate to legislate identity and meaning. We will consider how
literature and performance may resist ready categorizations, and how pleasure is activated
even as one faces the serious and the deadly (without simple resort to the masochistic).
A reading of poets published by Chax Press, ranging from publications in the 1980s to recent publications.
The VONA/Voices Writing Workshop, founded by Elmaz Abinader, Junot Díaz, Victor
Díaz, and Diem Jones in 1999, is the only workshop in the U.S. dedicated to the
aesthetics of writers of color. In 2014, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela of Thread Makes
Blanket Press published Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices
Writing Workshop. Dismantle brings together voices of writers of color from VONA
workshops across the years, alumni and faculty. Join us as we read writing from the
anthology, and as we talk about the important role of Thread Makes Blanket Press in
publishing.
The first ever VONA/Voices anthology, Dismantle, includes creative work from
established and new authors who have either taught at VONA, or are alumni of the
program. In spring 2014 the New York Times re-published a version of Junot Díaz’s
introduction in Dismantle in which he discusses his experience in his predominantly
White MFA program. While many of us have been having conversations about the
overwhelming Whiteness of MFA programs (faculty, students, curriculum), Díaz’s essay
encouraged a larger conversation about the overall lack of racial and ethnic diversity in
these programs. Dismantle’s importance in bringing together the voices of writers of
color, and in highlighting the work of VONA/Voices of Our Nation and Thread Makes
Blanket Press cannot be underestimated.
Ruth Vanita
Eduardo Chirinos
Paisley Rekdal
Farid Matuk
Bhanu Kapil
Jane Wong
Heather Cahoon
