The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and the Black Poetics Collective Present:
Black Queer Poetics: Community & Solitude
A reading and conversation featuring the award-winning poets francine j. harris and Phillip B. Williams
Thursday, May 24th, 6-7:30pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201). Food will be served.
francine j. harris was born in Detroit, Michigan. She earned a BA in English from Arizona State University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She is the author of play dead (Alice James Books, 2016) which was the winner of a 2017 Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, Meridian, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Boston Review. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she currently serves as the writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the book of poems Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Thom Gunn Poetry Award from the Publishing Triangle. He’s also co-authored a book of poems and conversations called Prime (Sibling Rivalry Press). A Cave Canem graduate, he has received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and has been awarded the Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, a 2017 Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, the Paris Review, West Branch and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the Co-editor in Chief of the online journal Vinyl, and currently teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Bennington College.
The visiting writers will also lead a Creative Writing Workshop (open to graduate and undergraduate students):
Friday, May 25th, 12-2pm in Crowe Hall 5-138 (African American Studies Conference Room). Food will be served.
Co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, The Graduate School, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Performance Studies, the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and the Critical Theory Cluster.