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Mazza Writer in Residence Priscilla Wathington with Colette Ghunim and Sara Maamouri

Steve M Dickison — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:28:59 +0000

Sunday, April 14, 2024

02:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

The Poetry Center presents Mazza Writer in Residence Priscilla Wathington, reading her poetry that draws from her experiences as a Palestinian American and her past human rights advocacy work with local Palestinian organizations, and joining in conversation with filmmakers Colette Ghunim and Sara Maamouri. Their work-in-progress film Traces of Home (2024), explores the impact of having to leave one's homeplace (Palestine and Mexico), through the lives of Ghunim's parents. The three artists will take up questions of documentation and storytelling in the representation of trauma, collaboration and working with the archive, and possibilities of collective healing.

From the filmmakers: "We want to share a trigger warning beforehand, that the scene from Palestine [one of several scenes to be shown from Traces of Home] includes an archival video of wounded children."

Please join us for this second public event in Wathington's Mazza Residency (she reads with Sam Sax, Thursday April 11) — and the first of two April events with The Poetry Center at Artists' Television Access for programs featuring Arab women poets and filmmakers (Egyptian-born Safaa Fathy appears at ATA Friday April 19).

The Mazza Writer in Residence program is supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation.

Artists' Television Access (ATA) is located on street level on Valencia at 21st Street; nearby parking often available in the municipal lot across the street on 21st at Barlett.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet and editor who lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick (Tram Editions), which draws from her past human rights and humanitarian work with NGOs such as Defense for Children International – Palestine, Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Arab American Action Network. Her poems have appeared in Adi Magazine, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. She sits on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

Filmed over six years, Traces of Home is a personal documentary in progress exploring filmmaker Colette Ghunim's disconnected relationship with her family through the lens of intergenerational trauma. Interweaving two international trips to find her parents’ ancestral homes in Mexico and Palestine, extensive family video archives, and intimate conversations with Colette's family, what begins as a desire to connect to her cultural origins turns into an internal quest to heal herself and her family. Video still (detail, above) from Traces of Home.

Colette Ghunim | Director
As a documentary filmmaker and nonprofit co-founder, Colette Ghunim’s soul purpose is to use the power of film and storytelling for those oppressed around the world to be seen, to be heard, and to heal. Her first documentary, The People’s Girls (2016), received over 2 million views and won Best Short Documentary at the Arab Film Festival for its bold spotlight on street harassment in Egypt. In co-production with Kartemquin Films and funded by Latino Public Broadcasting, she is directing Traces of Home, her first feature-length film, documenting her inner quest to find home through unearthing her parent’s forced migrations from Mexico and Palestine. Colette is also the co-founder of Mezcla Media Collective, a nonprofit organization aimed to cultivate a thriving landscape for over 700 women and non-binary filmmakers of color in Chicago. Her work has been highlighted on international outlets such as Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Univision, and TEDx. Colette was selected as a 2023 Obama Foundation USA Leader, 2024 Sundance Institute x ISF Fellow, and was featured on Arab America’s “30 Under 30” list. coletteghunim.com

Sara Maamouri | Editor/Producer
Sara Maamouri is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and editor who has explored a diverse range of topics for over 20 years. Her work touches on social, educational, and political issues, from We Are Not Princesses (2018), which follows Syrian refugees connecting with ancient truths through Sophocles’ Antigone, to the Peabody Award-winning film The Judge (2017), the groundbreaking story of the first woman appointed to the Sharia courts in the Middle East. A multilingual Tunisian-American, Sara brings cultural sensitivity to her editing, production, and story development, with an emphasis on social justice and impact driven filmmaking. Her most recent films include Black Mothers Love & Resist (SF International Film Festival 2022), and Clarissa’s Battle (Human Rights Watch Film Festival, NYC 2022). saramaamouri.com

Tripwire Series: Safaa Fathy, poet and filmmaker in person

Video

Mazza Writers in Residence 2017–2023 on video

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Mazza Writer in Residence Priscilla Wathington and Sam Sax, reading and in conversation

Steve M Dickison — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:48:21 +0000

Thursday, April 11, 2024

02:00 p.m. - 03:15 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

The Poetry Center's Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2024, poet Priscilla Wathington, is joined for this mid-afternoon occasion by poet Sam Sax. The two of them each read from their work then engage in conversation with one another and their audience. This is the first of two public programs during Priscilla Wathington's week-long residency, where otherwise she'll be visiting classes across the SF State campus as guest artist. The second public program brings Wathington and her poetry into conversation with Palestinian Mexican American filmmaker Colette Ghunim and her Tunisian American collaborator, Sara Maamouri (April 14 at ATA).

This event is co-presented with Race & Resistiance Studies, SF State.

The Mazza Writer in Residence program is supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation.

The Poetry Center reading room is located on the fifth floor of the Humanities Building at SF State, and is wheelchair accessible.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet and editor who lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick (Tram Editions), which draws from her past human rights and humanitarian work with NGOs such as Defense for Children International – Palestine, Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Arab American Action Network. Her poems have appeared in Adi Magazine, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander and elsewhere. She sits on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

Sam Sax is a queer jewish writer and educator. They're the author of PIG (Scribner, 2023), Yr Dead (McSweeney's, 2024), Madness (Penguin, 2017, National Poetry Series), and 'Bury It' (Wesleyan, 2018, James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets). Sax has received fellowships from The NEA, Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and Yaddo, is the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

Video

Mazza Writers in Residence, 2017–2023

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Mazza Writer in Residence Josiah Luis Alderete with Sara Borjas and Aideed Medina

Steve M Dickison — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 03:41:55 +0000

Thursday, October 05, 2023

07:00 p.m. - 09:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

Medicine for Nightmares, 3036 24th Street, San Francisco

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

The Poetry Center's Mazza Writer in Residence for Fall 2023, Josiah Luis Alderete, along with visiting with students as guest artist in classes across the SF State campus through the first week in October, presents his poems in two public programs. For the concluding event of Alderete's week in residency, he will be joined at home base, Medicine for Nightmares in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, by poet friends Sara Borjas and Aideed Medina, representing for Fresno, lately reputed to be "poetry capital of the universe." The Mazza Writer in Residence program is supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation.

This event is free and open to the public.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a Spanglish speaking full blooded Pocho poeta from La Mission de San Pancho. He is the author of the chapbook Fuchi Faces de los Estados Jodidos (Pinche Pandemico Poemas y Otra Nalga-Hyde Chismes) (2023) and Baby Axolotls and Old Pochos (Black Freighter Press, 2021), and runs the monthly Chicanx/Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl. Alongside his bookstore sister Tân Khánh Cao, Josiah is the owner of Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Galeria on Calle 24, a decolonial portal of language, art, and communidad. Photo by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta.

Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff, was published by Noemi Press in 2019 and received a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was featured as one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets and is the recipient of the 2018 Blue Mesa Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, CantoMundo, The Poetry Foundation, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Postgraduate Writers Conference, and Community of Writers. Her poems have been published in The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets, amongst others, and anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books, 2020), Get Lit: Words Ignite, and forthcoming in Até Mais: Until More: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms (Deep Vellum, 2024). She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized. She teaches creative writing at California State University, East Bay, and stays rooted in Fresno. Find her @saraborhaz or at www.saraborjas.com.

Aideed Medina is a poet and spoken word artist. She is a member of Reforma del Valle Central, advocating for “libros y comunidad”, and of Mothers Helping Mothers, an organization that works to alleviate crisis needs caused by political and environmental disasters. She is a University of California, California Naturalist Program (UC CNP) certified California naturalist, and practices “flor y canto" as part of her poetic process and exploration of California’s natural history. Her work has appeared in Fresno State's Club Austral Literary Magazine, Chicano Writers and Artists Association Journal, online on La Bloga, Poets Responding, Art of the Commune, and as part of a collection of original art songs composed for The Opera Remix, Fresno Grand Opera. Her book 31 Hummingbird: A Suite of Poems is new from editorial Xingao, of Oakland.

Videos

Mazza Writers in Residence, 2017 ff.

James Cagney and Josiah Luis Alderete: February 6, 2020

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Mazza Writer in Residence Josiah Luis Alderete with Mimi Tempestt, reading and in conversation

Steve M Dickison — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 03:13:54 +0000

Thursday, October 05, 2023

01:00 p.m. - 03:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

The Poetry Center's 11th Mazza Writer in Residence, Josiah Luis Alderete, in addition to being a guest artist in classes across the SF State campus during the first week in October 2023, presents his work in two public programs. The first of these, here in The Poetry Center reading room, will also feature Mimi Tempestt, debuting her new book, the delicacy of embracing spirals, and engaging in conversation with Alderete and their audience. The Mazza Writer in Residence program is supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation.

This event is free and open to the public.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and daughter of California. She has an MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her debut collection of poems, the monumental misrememberings, was published by Co-Conspirator Press in 2020. In 2021, she was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers, and was a Creative Fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. She is the 2023 recipient of the SFF/Nomadic Press Literary Prize in Poetry. Her second book, the delicacy of embracing spirals, is out from City Lights Books, Fall 2023. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Interim Poetics, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Videos

Mazza Writers in Residence

James Cagney and Josiah Luis Alderete: February 6, 2020

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Mazza Writer in Residence Phoebe Giannisi with Brandon Brown, at The Green Arcade

Steve M Dickison — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 03:50:15 +0000

Saturday, April 22, 2023

07:00 p.m. - 08:30 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

Mask requested for in-person attendance
Tune in to the video livestream

The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade co-present poet, performer, and scholar Phoebe Giannisi, visiting from her home in Athens, Greece, together with poet and translator Brandon Brown. Giannisi is The Poetry Center's Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2023, with her residency including guest appearances in various classrooms at SF State, as well as two public events. The first of these is a solo performance (in Greek and English) followed by a conversation with poet and scholar Eleni Stecopoulos and the audience, Thursday April 20 at The Poetry Center (link below). This second public event, with Bay Area poet Brandon Brown joining in, is the final Poetry Center program at The Green Arcade, where our dear friend Patrick Marks has hosted poets, writers, and artists since the bookstore opened in 2008. Please join us for what should be a memorable evening!

This event is free and open to the public. Susan Gevirtz will provide introductions for the poets.

The Mazza Writer in Residence series is supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation.

Phoebe Giannisi is the author of eight books of poetry in Greek, including Ομηρικά, (Athens : Kedros, 2010), published in German and in English (Homerica, translated by Brian Sneeden, World Poetry Books, 2017). This book has been selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017 (“unusually excellent new poetry book from Greece, in unusually excellent translation”) in the Paris Review. In 2022 a second poetry collection, Cicada, has been published in English by New Directions, also translated by Brian Sneeden. Giannisi works on polyphonic and chimeric poetics, mixing genres and media. She performs poetry, creates sound works, videos and poetic installations. Her last 5 projects and books, in the field of eco-poetics, focus on animal poets and their connection to land, myth, gender and human communities, using scholar and anthropological work.

Born in Athens, Giannisi is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Studies at the University of Thessaly, and lives in Volos, Greece.

Brandon Brown is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Work (Atelos) and The Four Seasons (Wonder). His first three books were translations of works by Aeschylus, Catullus, and Baudelaire. His translation of the complete poems of 12th century troubadour Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Joy Is My Hotel, is forthcoming in 2024. He has edited the zines Fuck You Longhair, Dee Dee's Kids, Sleep Is The Enemy, Commonweal, OMG!, and Panda's Friend, among others, and has lived in the Bay Area since 1998.

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Mazza Writer in Residence Phoebe Giannisi, introduced by and in conversation with Eleni Stecopoulos

Steve M Dickison — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 03:40:23 +0000

Thursday, April 20, 2023

04:00 p.m. - 06:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

Mask requested for in-person attendance
Tune in to the video livestream

The Poetry Center is honored to present outstanding poet, performer, and scholar Phoebe Giannisi, visiting from her home in Volos, Greece, as the Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2023. Giannisi's residency includes guest appearances in various classrooms at SF State, as well as two public events. The first of these will be a solo performance (in Greek and English) followed by a conversation with poet and scholar Eleni Stecopoulos and the audience. The second event, bringing Giannisi together with Bay Area poet and translator Brandon Brown, is indicated at the link below. Please join us on this rare visit to California by one of the most outstanding contemporary Greek poet/performers at work today.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Mazza Writer in Residence series is supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation.

An architect by formation, Giannisi holds a PhD in Classics from Lyon II-Lumère (1994). She has also co-authored, with Alexander Tzonis, a monograph on ancient Greek architecture. A 2015–2016 Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi is a founding member of the magazine [φρμκ]. In 2022 she was the first nominated Vakalo Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

She has contributed to several group shows including the Lyon Biennale (2009), Guggenheim New York (2013), Bauhaus Dessau (2015), Thessaloniki Biennale (2023). In 2010 she was co-curator for the Greek Pavilion of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition (La Biennale di Venezia) with a project on biodiversity and seeds, entitled The Ark. Old Seeds for New Metropolitan Cultures. Her solo exhibitions incorporate her work in poetry and poetics: 2012-13. TETTIX, a poetic video/sound installation about the cicada, Museum of National Art (EMST) in Athens. 2015. AIGAI_O, a project about goat husbandry, Angeliki Chatzimichali Museum in Athens (with Iris Lycourioti). Based on this research, on October 2016, she presented her lecture performance Nomos_The Land Song at Onassis Center, New York.

Born in Athens, Giannisi is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Studies at the University of Thessaly, and lives in Volos, Greece.

Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid work of criticism and autoethnography, and Armies of Compassion (2010), a poetry collection. Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, begun in response to a series of performances and conversations curated with The Poetry Center and ending in the pandemic era, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Recent work has appeared in Pamenar, Second Stutter, and in [φρμκ] Φάρμακο [Pharmako] translated into Greek by Phoebe Giannisi. In the last few years Stecopoulos has given invited talks at the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography, UT Austin; the MFA in Writing Program at UW Bothell; and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, U. of Chicago.

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Mazza Writer in Residence Ari Banias and Brandon Som, at Medicine for Nightmares

Steve M Dickison — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 23:26:32 +0000

Saturday, October 08, 2022

03:00 p.m. - 04:30 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

Medicine for Nightmares, 3036 24th Street, San Francisco

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
Masks are required for those attending in person.

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and Medicine for Nightmares.

Ari Banias is the author of A Symmetry (2021), winner of the 2021 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody (2016), both from W. W. Norton. Recent poems have appeared in bæst, Georgia Review, Hyperallergic, The Nation, The New Republic, Triple Canopy, Verse, Washington Square, and The Yale Review. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Currently, Ari lives in Chicago. aribanias.com

Brandon Som is the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books), winner of the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel's Moon (Tupelo Press). His new book Tripas is forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press in 2023. He lives on the unceded land of the Kumeyaay Nation and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.

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Mazza Writer in Residence Ari Banias and Demian Dinéyazhi’, at Beyond Binary

Steve M Dickison — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 23:04:28 +0000

Thursday, October 06, 2022

01:00 p.m. - 02:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

Fine Arts Gallery, 238 Fine Arts Bldg., San Francisco State University

gallery@sfsu.edu

Overview

This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
Masks are requested for those attending in person.

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and Fine Arts Gallery, SF State.

In conjunction with the exhibition Beyond Binary, The Poetry Center's Mazza Writer in Residence for Fall 2022, poet Ari Banias, is joined by poet and artist (and contributor to the exhibition) Demian Dinéyazhi’. They'll each read from their poems and engage in conversation with the audience. The exhibition runs from September 17 through October 27, with this event being one of several public programs taking place in the space of the gallery amid the twenty contributing artists' works. More here.

Demian DinéYazhi ́ is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. DinéYazhi´'s praxis interrogates normative spaces by refusing to settle or perform for exploitative galleries and publishers that act as gatekeepers to the lethargic, toxic legacy of Western paradigms. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail. @heterogeneoushomosexual

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Mazza Writer in Residence erica lewis and Christine No, reading and in conversation

Steve M Dickison — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 20:31:58 +0000

Saturday, March 12, 2022

03:00 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

We've moved to an in-person reading—audience welcome!—at The Poetry Center, though you can still attend by webinar (or watch via live-stream), for the concluding event in erica lewis's weeklong Mazza Writer in Residence program for Spring 2022. She'll be joined by Oakland-based poet Christine No, each reading from their work and engaging in conversation with one another and the audience.

Please note: proof of vaccination and mask are required in order to attend in person.

This book [mary wants to be a superwoman, erica lewis] made me suck my teeth and say goddamn, and yes, and thank you. This book hit me right in the ancestors, spoke to me like a sister. erica lewis is aware that time is fiction, in a way that only black women know. A collage of music and memories, language that’s lived before, people we carry and people we try to forget, causes and effects, the proverb that “everything is everything.” This work is both archival and built from scratch. It’s a stunning altar to the past, a balm for the present, and a prayer for what will be.
—Morgan Parker
Whatever Love Means is a searing ode to abandonment. The poems collected here detail a woman’s pursuit of survival despite the psyche’s cruelest intentions. “Woke up still,” Christine No writes, “a woman hell-bent on her own fantastic demise.” Where one is most vulnerable, one is most resilient, and No’s excavation of exactly that erupts amid these pages. Here, “even the dead are dancing.”
—Jeanann Verlee

Bios

erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she runs lil’ homie apothecary. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009) and camera obscura (2010, both with artist Mark Stephen Finein); murmur in the inventory (2013); the first two books of the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015) and mary wants to be a superwoman (2017); and all the real tears (2017). Her work has appeared in various anthologies, journals, and in numerous chapbooks (Afterhours Editions/The Song Cave, Belladonna, Lame House). She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Christine No is a Korean American poet, filmmaker and daughter of immigrants. She is a Sundance Alum, VONA Fellow, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, and has served as Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, a Program Coordinator for VONA; and currently serves on the board of Quiet Lightning, a literary nonprofit in the Bay Area. Christine is interested in the power of storytelling at the intersection of healing and social justice. You can find her work online and in print; and, her first full length poetry collection Whatever Love Means is available via Barrelhouse Books.

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Mazza Writer in Residence erica lewis and Divya Victor, reading and in conversation

Steve M Dickison — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 20:16:39 +0000

Thursday, March 10, 2022

05:00 p.m. - 06:00 p.m. PT

Free and open to the public

Remote access event

poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

Join us online as erica lewis, Poetry Center Mazza Writer in Residence for Spring 2022, is joined by Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Pen American Open Book Award poet Divya Victor. They'll each be reading from their poetry then joining in conversation with emcee, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta.

mary wants to be a superwoman [erica lewis] is a tapestry of woven continuums. Its images contain a methodical new naturalism where one’s past is the frontier, alternating with the brutal urgency of a witness who would save your life. erica lewis’ poems investigate the practice of identity and the sums of nonlinear biographies. Like a relaxed musician, she has the small secrets of the day at her fingertips.
—Tongo Eisen-Martin
Divya Victor’s Curb is extraordinary: it is a sobering poetic look at how white supremacy “curbs” the brown civilian who can slip between Muslim and Black, between terrorist and illegal. If they’re not targeted for what they are, they’re mistaken for what they’re not—with sometimes fatal consequences. Victor explores the murders of South Asians in America with piercing acumen, re-arranging historical documents into wholly original compositional strategies that draws me in but also pushes me back. I can never know what happened, only perceive the disquieting absence of lives annihilated by structural violence. Layered, rich, and epic, Curb is an incredible collection that must be read and re-read.
—Cathy Park Hong

Bios

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.), and her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Victor has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.

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