To
help you plan your festival schedule, we broke down panels, workshops,
and group readings by special interest. Check out those dealing with race and ethnicity below!
Race & Ethnicity
Thursday 3/27:
11:30am-1pm – Charles Sumner School, Rm 300
We’d Like to Have Words with You: A Poetry Reading and
Conversation with Two Generations of VONA/Voices Writers
Elmaz Abinader, Ruth Forman, Cynthia Dewi
Oka, Andrea Walls
The Voices of Our Nations Arts
Foundation (VONA/Voices) has been nurturing and supporting emerging writers of
color for fourteen years. We find that our workshop participants grow not only
from the workshops we offer but also from discussions and interactions within
the VONA/Voices Community. The conversations that span subjects from craft to
living the life of a writer, from bilingual texts to publishing, are essential
to prepare writers of color to enter the literary terrain. This themed reading
attempts to duplicate some of that interaction, combining a reading with
discussion involving faculty and former students.
2-3:30pm – Charles Sumner School, Rm 300
Affrilachia: Affrilachian Poets on Identity, Place &
Landscape
Ellen Hagan, Bianca
Spriggs, Shayla Lawson, Gerald L. Coleman,
Randall Horton,
Mitchell L.H Douglas, Kelly Norman Ellis, Keith
S. Wilson, Norman
Jordan, Crystal Good
The Affrilachian Poets is a
multi-cultural writing collective representing the Appalachian region, a
mountain range stretching over thirteen states along the East Coast. Since
1991, the Affrilachian Poets have been writing together, defying the persistent
stereotype of a racially homogenized rural region. They continue to reveal
relationships that link identity to familial roots, socio-economic
stratification and cultural influence, and an inherent connection to the land.
This reading will feature current members of the Affrilachian Poets sharing
their new work, with a Q&A session at the end.
4-5:30pm – Charles Sumner School, Rm 101
Touching and Naming the Roots of This Tree: Seeds for Multicultural/Multilingual
Narrative Poems
María Luisa Arroyo
As poets with roots here and in other
countries or cultures, we must continue to write narrative poems that authentically
reflect the complexity of our own identities and journeys, even as we call the
United States home. Part of this complexity stems from the need to write
narrative poems that code-switch between languages and/or are written in one's
mother tongue(s). When we do so and when we factor in race, ethnicity, class,
gender, language, and identity, we capture more fully the experiences we, our
living relatives, and our ancestors have and have had. Please bring an object
of personal meaning (a photo, a newspaper clipping, a factory ID, etc.) to you
and/or to a family member, living or deceased, as a writing prompt for yourself
and others. The workshop leader is a multi-linguist (English, Spanish, German,
and conversational Farsi) who invites participants to own your own languages
and dialects as you write and read aloud your first drafts.
Friday 3/28:
11:30am-1pm - Human Rights
Campaign, Rm 105A
Gathering Forces: A Living Anthology of
Black LGBTQ Poetry
Tisa Bryant, Reginald Harris, John Keene, Kevin Simmonds
We will perform and discuss selected
works by notable black LGBTQ poets from the Harlem Renaissance era to the 1990s
(e.g., Ai, Essex Hemphill, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Claude
McKay, Pat Parker, Reginald Shepherd). Discussion will consider the poets,
their choices, experiments, ideas, contexts, and structures. The session will
conclude with a Q&A that addresses the key role that black LGBTQ authors
have, and continue to play, in expanding our sense of the possibilities of literature
and the arts, (re)shaping canons and transforming contemporary politics via the
poetic.
11:30am – 1pm – Charles Sumner School, Rm 102
Voices from the Latino Heartland: A
Reading of Identity & Displacement by the Latino Writers Collective
Miguel M. Morales, José Faus, Maria Vasquez
Boyd, Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons
Middle of the Map-Latino Writers
Collective members will read and discuss the challenges and success of writing
from the heartland, maintaining diversity of culture, and examining issues of
displacement. Members capture individual experiences as political or social
commentary, reflective, semi-autobiographical, humorous, or entertaining. Their
craft reveals and examines the many facets of this unique cultural identity
that includes class, gender roles, sexual identity, and immigration status.
2-3:30pm – Charles
Sumner School, Rm 300
Calling Whiteness to Account
Ailish Hopper, Joy
Katz, Rachel Richardson, Sarah Browning
Four white writers, all with recent or
in-progress work that engages race, discuss how whiteness “happens” in writing
(often without a writer realizing it) and how they attempt to challenge and
disrupt that "happening" while making art. How do white poets
acknowledge our privilege while also calling it to account? How do we identify
and move past (while even occasionally harnessing) fear, self-consciousness,
self-censorship, and guilt? Panelists share their approaches to the complexity
of crossing the color line and to sensing where empathy—or, apparent
empathy—ends and patience, vigorous observation, and even humor and wildness,
come in. The conversation is open to people of all races and ethnicities who
want to talk about the intersection of race, responsibility, and the demands of
art.
4-5:30pm – Wilderness Society Conference Room
Arte Poética II: The Politics of Publishing En Español in the
United States of America
José R. Ballesteros, Mario A. Escobar,
Jesús Vázquez-Mendoza, Carlos Parada Ayala
A reading and roundtable discussion by
owners, editors, and poets representing independently owned US literary presses
that publish in Spanish in the US. The panel will begin with a brief reading
showcasing recent work published by US-based Spanish language literary presses.
It will include a roundtable discussion (in English) of the political
implications of publishing in Spanish within the US. Special attention will be
given to the empowering role promoting writing in Spanish via publication can
and must play within marginalized US-Latino populations.
Saturday 3/29:
9:30-11am –
Wilderness Society Conference Room
Learning Race Through Writing Race: A Workshop for White Poets and
Others
Martha
Collins, Susan Tichy
This workshop will give poets who have
just begun to write about race (or just begun to think about it) a chance to
consider ways of approaching racial subjects in poems. Facilitated by two white
poets who have themselves written a great deal about race, the workshop is open
to everyone. We will examine published poems that deal with racial subjects
from a variety of perspectives (including the personal and the historical), and
use a variety of poetic strategies; we will also consider some poems by white
poets that are “unintentionally” racial. We will then invite participants to
write down responses to a series of questions that will help them to see
themselves and their experiences in racialized terms and to suggest ways of
approaching those experiences in writing. In the time that remains,
participants will share these answers, which we hope might become starting
points for poems.
11:30am-1pm – Beacon
Hotel, Beacon Room
New Vietnamese Poetry: A Group Reading & Discussion
Cathy Linh Che, Paul
Tran, Ocean Vuong
The Vietnam War continues to inform
public discourse, scholarship, and national policies on race, empire, and the
struggle for human rights. This layered roundtable and reading will excavate
voices from the diaspora’s exiled. Three Vietnamese American poets will share
their work and lead a discussion on the Vietnam War and its legacies in new
Vietnamese poetry, exploring death, ghosts, belonging, displacement, memory,
debt, intergenerational trauma, and sexual assault. It will examine how poetry
and spoken word recover the history of marginalized peoples and the war's
connection to U.S. colonialism throughout the world. Sponsored by Kundiman, an
organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American
poetry.
11:30am-1pm - Human
Rights Campaign, Rm 105A
A Bridge Across Our Fears: Poetry in Service of Racial Solidarity
Franny Choi, Danez
Smith
Throughout history, communities of
color have been pitted, intentionally, against one another. True change can
only begin when our communities stand in solidarity, meeting these divisive
forces with the same intentionality and mindfulness. Poetry, as the site of
radical reimagining as well as deep introspection, offers a particularly rich
space to discover and build points of racial solidarity. Members of the
multi/inter-racial Dark Noise Collective lead participants through writing
exercises that aim to uncover common ground, finding strength in the
differences among our lived experiences of oppression. Workshop leaders will
also speak on their experience constructing a cross-cultural poetry cooperative
whose goal is to leverage our shared language(s) to challenge dominant
structures of power. Though our focus will primarily be racial solidarity, we
invite participants to speak and write on their experiences creating solidarity
across other points of difference.
2-3:30pm - Human Rights Campaign, Rm105A
Poetry & the New Black Masculinity
Kevin Simmonds, Danez Smith, Ross Gay, Pages Matam, Tim Seibles
Black masculinity in America is
expressed variously and its range encompasses assertions and disruptions often
missing from mainstream imagery and reportage. The work of contemporary black
male poets--traditional and radical, genre-defiant, funny, sobering and
bracingly inclusive--reflects this fluid and multitudinous range. Panelists
will share their poetry and discuss themes and conventions emanating from their
own social, artistic, and political narratives.
2-3:30pm – Wilderness Society Conference Room
Scars of History – Luso Poetry of Witness
Millicent Borges
Accardi, Amy Sayre Baptista, Nancy Vieira Couto, PaulA Neves
Although often misunderstood and
marginalized Portuguese (Luso) culture still bears the scars of history: from
the Inquisition's forced migration of Sephardic Jews and subsequent persecution
of crypto-Jews and New Christians, to the reign of Salazar, to the 1974 Carnation
Revolution. Portugal faces the threat of erasure by dominant Western culture
that reduces it to a non-place, which in turn is reflected in the reduced
portrayal on maps, or the complete elimination of Portuguese Islands. This
round table will accordingly present poetry of witness by Portuguese and
Portuguese-American writers and a discussion of the legacy of these cultural
ruptures.
2-3:30pm – Human Rights Campaign, Rm 105B
Struggle, Resilience & Transformation:
Queer Arabs in the Diaspora
Amir
Rabiyah, Amirah Mizrahi, Janine Mogannam, Andrea Assaf
As queer Arabs / Arab Americans, many
people and institutions attempt to speak for us. The act of sharing our
stories, as they are and as our full selves, becomes provocative. When your
identity itself is provocative (not necessarily intending to create political
work, but by simply being a politicized body), what does it mean to write
poetry and “witness” from that position? As people with a broad spectrum of
identities within the Arab community, including different religions,
nationalities, and migration stories, we often move through society with parts
of ourselves made hyper-visible, and others invisible. What happens to us when
we compartmentalize aspects of our identities in order to gain acceptance? How
do we continue to create transformative work in the context of intersecting
systemic oppressions? Join us as we share our poetry and invite the audience to
engage these questions and more, through creative writing and dialogue.
