Full-program video: Jackie Wang and Lily Hoang: March 1, 2018
Video highlight clips: Jackie Wang, from "The Prison Abolitionist Imagination: A Conversation" (Carceral Capitalism) | "The poet prisoner haunts the guard, who becomes a prisoner of his paranoia...." Jackie Wang, from Carceral Capitalism | Lily Hoang, from her essay "On Measurement" (A Bestiary) | Lily Hoang reads her essay "On Violence," from A Bestiary
The first of two Poetry Center events in conjunction with the nationwide Poetry Coalition series on The Body
Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation to the Academy of American Poets on behalf of the Poetry Coalition.
“…Where am I, in all this—in the chaos of a city that moves without thinking
All day I struggle to make a day
Bury myself in sand and dust
And from nowhere sing that the tolling bell is for us, our rebirth…”
—Jackie Wang, from “Because There is Silence”
“We wait at the mouth of the bus stop while other people requiem. The bus passes us by without stopping. And we wait beneath a sky filled with nowhere to go. I place a grass crown against your temples to distance your grace.”
—Lily Hoang, “Waiting at the Bus Stop”
Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Contest), Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award), and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues). She teaches in the MFA program at UC San Diego, and serves as Editor at Jaded Ibis Press and was Executive Editor for HTML Giant.
Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University. She is the author of the nonfiction book Carceral Capitalism (Semiotexte / MIT Press), a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (Capricious), and a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme. She tweets @loneberrywang and blogs at loneberry.tumblr.com