This speaker series will examine literary experiments in prose and poetics by contemporary poets, critics and artistsAbout this Event
The speaker series will examine literary experiments in prose and poetics by contemporary poets, critics and artists. The explorations in poetics, sonic production, visual culture, critical thought, textual assemblage, auto-theory and artmaking articulate the possibilities of living and making inside the racialized enclosure and advance a set of radical propositions regarding the deformation and reformation of prose, narrative, poetic and visual practice.
Each reading will be followed by a small academic seminar with the speaker led by Professor Saidiya Hartman. Seminars are restricted capacity, and will be held on the 7th floor of Schermerhorn Extension. You may RSVPs for the seminar(s) of your choosing at the same time as you RSVP for the reading.
The series will engage the work of contemporary writers and artists: Samiya Bashir, Dionne Brand, Derrais Carter, Krista Franklin, Steffani Jemison, and Christina Sharpe.
Series ScheduleApril 13: Dionne Brand
Reading
4:00PM - 5:30PM ET
Columbia Journalism World Room Pulitzer Hall, 2950, Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Seminar
5:45PM - 7:00PM ET
754 Schermerhorn Extension, 1200 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
April 19: Derrais Carter & Samiya Bashir
Reading
4:00PM - 5:30PM ET
Deutches Haus 420 W 116th St, New York, NY 10027
Seminar
5:45PM - 7:00PM ET
754 Schermerhorn Extension,1200 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
April 27: Krista Franklin
Reading
4:00PM - 5:30PM ET
Earl Hall - Dodge Room 2980 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Seminar
5:45PM - 7:00PM ET
758 Schermerhorn Extension, 1200 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
May 3: Christina Sharpe
Reading
4:00PM - 5:30PM ET
East Gallery, Buell Hall, Columbia Maison Française 515 West 116th Street New York, NY 10027
Seminar
5:45PM - 7:00PM ET
754 Schermerhorn Extension, 1200 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
May 10: Steffani Jemison
Reading
4:00PM - 5:30PM ET
East Gallery, Buell Hall, Columbia Maison Française 515 West 116th Street New York, NY 10027
Seminar
5:45PM - 7:00PM ET
754 Schermerhorn Extension, 1200 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
You do not have to attend all the events. RSVP to any event(s) of your choosing.
Speaker BiosDionne Brand was born in Trinidad and is a poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, filmmaker, educator, and activist. She has written 10 previous books of poetry, and is a winner of the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a past winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. She was Toronto’s third Poet Laureate from 2009-2012. In 2017 she was named to the Order of Canada. Brand is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.
Derrais (pronounced like Paris) Carter is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist. Currently, he is completing two scholarly monographs. The first, provisionally titled Obscene Material: Erasing Black Girlhood in the Moens Scandal examines the erasure of Black girls' voices during a 1919 obscenity scandal in Washington, D.C. The second book, co-authored with Andres Guzman, is a study of race and patriarchy in contemporary popular culture titled Patriarchal Blackness. Carter’s creative practice includes art books, experimental essays, and micro-essays. Guiding his creative process is a persistent desire to use archival texts and Black critical theory to narrate and engage Black life. He is currently completing black girls: an archive with Sharita Towne.
Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.
Krista Franklin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, Vinyl, BOMB Magazine, Encyclopedia Vol. F-K and L-Z, and several anthologies. She is the author of Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018) and Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). Her art has been exhibited at Poetry Foundation, Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, The National Museum of Mexican Art, and on the set of 20th Century Fox’s Empire. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago, and teaches Writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Christina Sharpe is a Writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. She is the author of: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010). Her third book, Ordinary Notes, will be published in 2023 (Knopf/FSG/Daunt). She recently completed "The abacus of her eyelids," the critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand. She is working on a monograph called Black. Still. Life. She has recently published essays in Art in America; Alison Saar Of Aether and Earthe; Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America; Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America; and Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing.
Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at JOAN Los Angeles (2022), Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati (2021), the Everson Museum (2021), the Stedelijk Museum (2019), Nottingham Contemporary (2018), Jeu de Paume and CAPC Bordeaux (both 2017), MoMA, New York (2015), RISD Museum, Providence (2015), and LA>A Rock, A River, A Street, was published by Primary Information in October 2022. Jemison holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003).
Saidiya Hartman was born and raised in New York City. She is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). She has published articles on slavery, the archive, and the city, including “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Belly of the World.” She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University.
Important InformationSeating for each event is available on a first-come first-served basis, RSVPs do not guarantee admission.
All attendees must show either a CU/BC ID (affiliates) or vaccination record (non-affiliate) for entry to the events.
Event Venue
Columbia University, 116th St & Broadway, New York, United States
USD 0.00