S199.
We Find Countries in Each Other: Black Poets Speak from Across the Diaspora
Saturday, March 11, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
In a country where Black life is rooted in precarity, Black poetics becomes more than a practice of witness, but rather an act of nation-building. Black poetics offers a space where our freedoms are no longer dependent upon the great dragon that is america (to paraphrase Audre Lorde), but rather only limited by the expansiveness of Black imagination. Join four Black poets from across the African Diaspora read poems offering their visions of a free Black nation that is limitless in ijoy and pleasure
Participants
Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet and activist. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, her work is featured or forthcoming in Origins, Drunk in the Midnight Choir, the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, pluck!, The Little Patuxent Review, and other publications.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 Journal/ Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize winner and Haint, a 2017 Ohioana Poetry Book award winner. She's a Cave Canem fellow, a Black Ladies Brunch Collective member, and Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born award-winning poet, educator, publisher, and social advocate. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including the Mass Book Award winner, When My Body Was a Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press). His fourth book, American Scapegoat, is due out May 2023.
Natasha Marin is a conceptual artist whose people-centered projects have circled the globe and have been recognized by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others. She is the curator of Black Imagination (McSweeney’s 2020) and Black Powerful (2022). www.black-imagination.com.
