T141.
It’s Alive… It’s Alive! Using Horror Film Aesthetics in Poetry
Thursday, February 8, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am
Long viewed as an outside genre, horror only rarely skirts so-called mainstream “artistic legitimacy,” as seen recently in the award-winning films of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. How can poets use horror films to push, even transgress, the boundaries of verse, and explore intersections of body, identity, and sociocultural history? Five poets will share how horror films have shaped their work, from processing the body to translating trauma. Who will survive and what will be left of them?
Participants
Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books, most recently the fiction collection Carnivalia. He teaches at Prairie View A&M University and is the executive director of the Radius of Arab American Writers.
Sara Eliza Johnson is the recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and Winter Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, among other honors. Her first book, Bone Map, won the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her second book, Vapor, will be published in 2022.
Christopher Munde is the author of the poetry collection Slippage, and his poems have also appeared in Blackbird, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, West Branch, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Houston’s MFA program, he currently teaches in western New York.
Christian J. Collier is a Black Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press.
Melanie Jordan is a Tennessee writer and editor currently in Newnan, Georgia. Hallelujah for the Ghosties is her first book. She holds degrees from University of Tennessee Chattanooga, Southern Illinois University, and the University of Houston. She teaches creative writing and tech writing.
