S144.
Excavating Story & Silence: The Poetics of Erasure
Saturday, March 26, 2022
10:35 am to 11:50 am
We are innovative writers who unearth hidden stories through erasure poetry, peeling away language to reveal invisible worlds beneath given texts. We examine letters, visual artifacts, pharmaceutical data, and Ancestry.com reports to excavate buried narratives through erasures, a dynamic form that potentially reenacts and heals silences related to family, race, illness, and trauma. We discuss techniques for writing erasures and unearthing hidden texts to reveal vital voices and revelations.
Participants
Hadara Bar-Nadav is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and Fountain and Furnace. She is also coauthor of Writing Poems, 8th ed. Bar-Nadav is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Donika Kelly is the author of the full-length collections The Renunciations and Bestiary. She is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.
Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet, multimedia artist, author of Ghost Of, and recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College low-residency MFA and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Kiki Petrosino is professor of poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of four books of poetry, including White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and Witch Wife. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature.
