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Asha Futterman will discuss "Song of Gray." She will be joined in discussion by Mary Helen Callier and Leah Flax Barber. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.At the Co-op.
About the book: "Song of Gray" approaches Black experience by clarifying the concrete worlds that exist between humanity and objecthood. Asha Futterman renders this in-between space as it reveals itself in performance: in a contemporary performance workshop, at an audition, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in the dailiness of the YMCA, her porch, the walk to the train.
These poems build new logic systems. Futterman stands at her grandmother’s grave and proclaims, “how powerful how dense and naked how inaccurate.” With quiet, deadpan, and piercing language, "Song of Gray" offers earnest, felt relationships to race, empathy, pleasure, and nonsense.
“There wasn’t a sunrise / just gray / then brighter gray.” In "Song of Gray," blackness is not definite—it is an ambivalent hole as much as an area of hope. Blackness is a song of gray.
About the author: Asha Futterman is an actor and poet from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Her chapbook empathy was published by The Song Cave in 2024 and her first book of poems "Song of Gray" won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She currently teaches children in at Saint Ann’s Brooklyn.
About the interlocutors: Leah Flax Barber is a writer from Chicago. She is the author of "The Mirror of Simple Souls" (Winter Editions, 2025). Recent writing has appeared in Harper’s, Cleveland Review of Books, The Common, Poetry Daily, Common Place Poetics, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor at Conjunctions and a Rubenstein Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School and lives in Hyde Park, Chicago.
Mary Helen Callier’s debut collection, "When the Horses," was the winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, New England Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is currently a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as a poetry editor for Denver Quarterly.
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Event Venue
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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