#pacificislandwriters

• NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED, TO BE RE-SCHEDULED

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies, SF State

Join the editors and guest contributors for a celebratory reading and conversation, presenting work from and talking about the issues raised by this first-ever anthology of contemporary eco-literature gathering the work of one hundred Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures is newly in print from the University of Hawaii Press.

The urgent voices in this book call us to attention—to action!—at a time of great need. Pacific ecologies and the lives of Pacific Islanders are currently under existential threat due to the legacy of environmental imperialism and the ongoing impacts of climate change. While Pacific writers celebrate the beauty and cultural symbolism of the ocean, islands, trees, and flowers, they also bravely address the frightening realities of rising sea levels, animal extinction, nuclear radiation, military contamination, and pandemics.

Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures reminds us that we are not alone; we are always in relation and always ecological. Humans, other species, and nature are interrelated; land and water are central concepts of identity and genealogy; and Earth is the sacred source of all life, and thus should be treated with love and care. With this book as a trusted companion, we are inspired and empowered to reconnect with the world as we navigate towards a precarious yet hopeful future.

• Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (editor) is Climate Envoy for the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the director of Jo-Jikum, an environmental nonprofit.
   
• Leora (Lee) Kava (editor) is assistant professor of Critical Pacific Islands and Oceania studies at San Francisco State University.

• Craig Santos Perez (editor and series editor) is professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

With emcee, Steve Dickison

Presented in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition

Cosponsored by The Poetry Center and the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, SF State

We welcome people with disabilities and want to do what we can to make this event accessible to you. *** ASL interpretation and Live Captioning will be provided. *** Media captioning will be available after the event at our YouTube channel and at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Academy of American Poets in support of Poetry Coalition programs

• ...There are names each thing has for itself,
  and beneath us the other order already moves.
  It is burning.
  It is dreaming.
  It is waking up.
  —Linda Hogan, from "Map"

The Poetry Center, in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition, presents one in a series of programs across the country during March and April around this shared topic. Four poets, whose work is recognized for its address to ideas of justice, to our global climate crisis, and to the effects of colonialism and racial capitalism, read from their work and join in conversation with one another and, time permitting, in response to questions from the audience. Ed Roberson, Tiffany Higgins, Eli Clare, and Lehua M. Taitano will be joined by emcee, Steve Dickison.

Ed Roberson is the author of many books of poetry, including the newly, released Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021) and the forthcoming MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021). A former special programs administrator at Rutgers University’s Cook Campus, Roberson has lived in Chicago since 2004 and is an emeritus professor in Northwestern University’s MFA creative writing program. He has also held posts at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Cave Canem retreat for black writers. His honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the African American Literature and Culture Association’s Stephen Henderson Critics Award. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Roberson has worked as a limnologist’s assistant (conducting research on inland and coastal freshwater systems in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and in Bermuda), as a diver for the Pittsburgh Aquazoo, in an advertising graphics agency, and in the Pittsburgh steel mills.

Tiffany Higgins, a 2022 Fulbright scholar to Brazil’s Amazon, writes on Brazil and the environment. As well as translating from Portuguese, she is the author of two collections of poems, And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet (2009), selected by Evie Shockley as the winner of the 2008 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Prize, and the long-poem chapbook, The Apparition at Fort Bragg. Her poetry, literary translation from Portuguese, and journalism appear in Granta, Mongabay, Poetry, and elsewhere. She was the 2020 Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.

Eli Clare. White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in the occupied Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of creative non-fiction, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Duke U Press, 2017) and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion, and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies. Eli speaks, teaches, and facilitates all over the United States and Canada at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. He is currently a University at Buffalo Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first-ever Queerness and Disability Conference.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones, and her chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the  Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has two recent chapbooks of poetry and visual art:  Sonoma and Capacity. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally. She is the recipient of a 2019 Eliza So Fellowship and the 2019 Summer Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Center at The University of Arizona. She has served as an APAture Featured Literary Artist via Kearny Street Workshop, a Kuwentuhan poet via The Poetry Center at SFSU, and as a Culture Lab visual artist and curatorial advisor for the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Center. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora. Future Ancestors, Art 25’s collaboration with Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, was part of AFTER LIFE (we survive), Winter 2021–22 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. More here.

Watch the unedited video at YouTube before the finished program gets posted at Poetry Center Digital Archive

With emcee, TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter

Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

This remote-access event starts promptly at 7:00 pm Pacific Time and is free and open to the public. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel, and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu.

The Poetry Center welcomes Brontez Purnell, as Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2021. For this sixth iteration of the twice-annual Mazza Residency, this prolific and astoundingly versatile writer and artist will be visiting as a guest in classes across the SF State campus through the week of April 5, and offering two public performances: a solo reading and conversation, with emcee TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter, on Wednesday April 7 at 4:00 pm Pacific Time, and on Thursday April 8 at 7:00 pm Pacific, a queer writers of color reading and round table with Bay Area friends Cisco Guzman, Mason J., and Melissa Merin, also with emcee TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and two novels. Purnell is also frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, the co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and most recently the documentary Unstoppable Feat: Dances of Ed Mock. Two books of fiction, Since I Laid My Burden Down, and Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger, were published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. His short film 100 Boyfriends Mixtape is screening at the Criterion Channel, and his new novel 100 Boyfriends is out now on MCD Books from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for over 18 years.

Cisco Guzman was born in LA long before it was cool, imagining himself the love child of David Bowie and Patti Smith and entrusted to the loving but hilariously dysfunctional care of Mexican immigrants—whose job it was to toughen him up for the cosmic battles ahead. In an effort to outrun what felt like fated suffering, he went to Stanford University where he majored in Feminist Studies, though his resume says he majored in Interdisciplinary Studies because he is a pragmatic revolutionary who would rather dismantle the master’s house than have a conversation about it. Poetic status updates on whether this Trojan horse approach to social change is working can be gleaned via printed word, collage, song, and should hopefully be evidenced by his everyday actions to design humane software that helps people to hate their lives less.

Mason J. is a Black & Indigenous SF-born artist, historiographer, media strategist, and community organizer with varied interests ranging from Klaus Nomi to Keeping up with The Kardashians. Their focused passions include land use, youth empowerment, LGBTQ senior services, disability justice, intersex rights, gender/sexuality. In addition to previously working with the SFPL James C. Hormel Center and Transgender Cultural District, Mason currently acts as Program Manager and Co-Founder of RADAR Productions Show Us Your Spines BIPoC queer archives residency. They are the author of Crossbones on My Life (Nomadic Press, 2021) and co-editor of Still Here SF: An Anthology of Queer and Trans People Raised in San Francisco (Foglifter, 2019), and additionally take great pride in their Public Health Nerd, Two-Spirit, Jewish, Nightlifer, Ballroom, Leather, Punk, and Soul Boy identities.

Melissa Merin is a queer Black woman, parent, and educator who has been living on Ohlone Land/SF Bay Area since 1999. She plays music—as Suspect, Suspect—and has self-published a handful of chapbooks and blogs. She participates in advocating and facilitating work toward accountability from transformative and restorative perspectives. Check out her writings and recordings on these activities here. Melissa is actively working for the destruction of white power and dreams of bankrolling Antifa.

Featured:

Brontez Purnell's New Book 100 Boyfriends Feels Right at Home in 2021, by Quinn Roberts, Interview magazine, February 17, 2021

Related event:

Brontez Purnell, Mazza Writer in Residence, a solo reading and conversation
with emcee, TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter
Wednesday April 7, 4:00 pm Pacific Time
remote access event, free and open to the public

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event email: 

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center, Mazza Writer in Residence