S185.
Beyond the Trauma Plot: Reframing Trauma Toward a Poetics of Justice
Saturday, March 11, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
In recent years, the focus on personal trauma has narrowed the conversation, prioritizing individual experience over collective outcomes. Where trauma narratives romanticize suffering and offer easy redemption arcs, poetic innovation and craft deepen our understanding of the language of injustice. Five poets—whose works span collective and individual traumatic histories—will discuss the ways they innovate form and language toward more three-dimensional work in both poetry and personal narrative.
Participants
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American author of two books of poetry. Poems from her new collection, Bianca, were awarded Poetry's Bess Hokin Prize and have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, Eugenia serves as a poetry editor at The Adroit Journal.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian, and a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives with her son in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California.
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the 2021 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Dr. Christina Sharpe. He lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography.
Nathan McClain is the author of Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017), both from Four Way Books. He is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and a Cave Canem fellow. He currently teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review.
Janine Joseph, a poet and librettist, is the author of Decade of the Brain and Driving without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. A co-organizer for Undocupoets, she is an associate professor at Oklahoma State University and a Dean's Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Virginia Tech.
