Readings, Conversation, and Q&A

*Part of the Collective Protest and Rebellion: A Black Study Intensive Series*

This event features transnational and genre-breaking writer Dionne Brand and poet Harryette Mullen who, according to Elizabeth Frost, “pioneered her own form of bluesy, disjunctive lyric poetry.” Both of these writers stretch the boundaries of language—itself an act of resistance—contributing to the new meaning-making, from the inner landscape to the outer landscape. This event is co-presented with the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center.

The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics’ (CAAPP) week-long Black Study Intensive, “Collective Protest and Rebellion,” features poet/essayist/novelist Dionne Brand, filmmaker Charles Burnett, filmmaker Julie Dash, poet/performer/composer JJJJJerome Ellis, poet Aracelis Girmay, scholar Emily Greenwood, writer/cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, poet/scholar Erica Hunt, interdisciplinary theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones, photographer Zun Lee, poet/scholar Harryette Mullen, and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon as a way to think in creativity toward collective agency and social change. With urgency, we look toward the 2020/2021 academic year as an opportunity to, in Fred Moten’s sense of the word, “study” together, what he sometimes calls talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. This week we come together to engage in black study in community during this time of upheaval and repair. It is here where we seek innovative discovery in the act of creating as productive of new knowledges that help change the world. We hope you’ll join us for the entire week!