F141.
Beyond Motherhood: Ritual, Myth, & Self-Fashioning in Poetry
Friday, March 25, 2022
10:35 am to 11:50 am
This panel combines readings by four lively poets with a discussion centered around the following questions: How do suppressed or redirected desires for motherhood (or nonmaternity) reside in our poems? How do our identities as cisgender or nonbinary, Black or white, immigrant or native-born make their way into poems that critique, reject, or resurrect the maternal? How do our forms give voice to the silenced or forbidden? Our collaborative conversation invites audience participation.
Participants
Karen Kovacik is the author of the poetry collections Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain, translator of Jacek Dehnel's Aperture, and editor of Scattering the Dark, anthology of Polish women poets. Recipient of an NEA translation fellowship, she teaches at IUPUI in Indianapolis.
Ewa Chrusciel has three books in English: Of Annunciations, Contraband of Hoopoe, and Strata and three in Polish: Furkot, Sopiłki, Tobołek. Her translations include books by Jorie Graham, Joseph Conrad, IB Singer, and Jack London. Her book Contraband of Hoopoe came out in Italy in 2019.
Maudelle Driskell is the executive director of The Frost Place. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, awarded by Poetry Magazine and the Modern Language Association.
Vievee Francis is the author of three poetry collections, Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark, and Forest Primeval. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, among other journals. Her latest work is The Shared World.
