caapoetryandpoetics-blog

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

New Orleans, Louisiana For the drowning, yes, there is always panic. Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out a need to know. You only feel you need to live. That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest fills with a strange new air, you will not ask what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth, but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb that keeps it kicking. Let it.

Rickey Laurentiis, “You Are Not Christ”

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

Incarnation Father escaped mother with his chow mein and the flaming red-haired woman who served it to him. Mother remained starched white rice steaming in a black kettle. Jesus was at the Lutheran church across the street—I had access to him. this white light of mine; I’m gonna let it shine let it shine ‘til Jesus comes; this white light of mine No one knew, Jesus and I weren’t white each of us conceived—immaculately. Hungry for sweet potato pie and string bean chop suey, I jumped the fence, the neighborhood, the city. At a monastery in New York I confess to a priest, and twenty-seven poets that I am Black and they, the Cave Canem poets, respond, Amen. Sticky Rice, publishes my poem, “White Dragon” no one says: you’re not Asian.   I shave my head. Thank you Nikki Giovanni, Sapphire, Ndegeocello. I am a Buddhist nun, burn the chapters of my memoir one by one.

Sherry Quan Lee

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

Alt(e)ar is a performace and art installation created by interdisciplinary performance artist and writer Kiki Williams, and installation artist Aya Rodriguez-Izumi. This multimedia event uses art and performance to interrogate the spaces between audience and viewer, between cultures, and between genders with the ultimate goal of opening a liminal space of experience. There will be two showings: April 11, 2017 | Studio Theatre at University of Pittsburgh | 8:30pm April 12, 2017 | Studio Theatre at University of Pittsburgh | 8:30pm Second performance ends in Q&A

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But how presumptuous shall we hope to find Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.

Phillis Wheatley

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We are excited to announce that Rickey Laurentiis is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at Pitt! Rickey will begin his two-year fellowship this fall.

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, as well as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery award and the Lambda Literary Award, among other distinctions. His poetry has been supported by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, he traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. He earned his MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and his Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where he read literature and queer theory.

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[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

Watch: Warsan Shire recites her poem “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love,” as heard in Lemonade

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Interactive Community Workshop with M. NourbeSe Philip

April 4, 2017 - 7:00pm Kelly-Strayhorn Theater's Alloy Studios

5530 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15206

http://ow.ly/GzzM309YzIt

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Black dolls matter.

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

“Cabin Fever” Oil on canvas 16x20 Available at Corey Helford Gallery Contact sherri@coreyhelfordgallery.com for inquiries

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Featuring Pitt’s very own Ariana Brown!

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Join Poet Tonya M. Foster & architect Mabel Wilson tonight in conversation about place, memory, politics, & blackness: http://ow.ly/AVZf309boaD

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[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

Incense, featherbones and mustard greens Curb ball, nigger-knocking, penny-candy at the liquor store Cornrows, Blue Magic, pallet on the floor Grandma—

L’Oreal Snell

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

In the span of a few years, there have been an unusual number of international exhibits of the work of Haitian-Nuyorican-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2014, the city of Paris named a public square in its 13th arrondissement after Basquiat. In the aftershocks of the extrajudicial killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and countless others, Basquiat’s iconic paintings “Irony of a Negro Policeman” (1981) and “The Death of Michael Stewart” (1983) frequently appeared in social media. What do we make of this moment of Basquiat’s major global “revival”?  What has been erased from the criticism, curation and consumption of Basquiat’s global legacy? What might we re-vision in Basquiat’s work if we rightfully reframe him as an erasurist? Basquiat's visual critique simultaneously tests limits and asks us to think across boundaries. He embodies interdisciplinarity as resourcefulness or even a kind of love; the act of collecting and drawing on anything available in the name of survival.

http://bit.ly/2ieuM8A

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

[caapoetryandpoetics-blog]

Join poet and essayist Ocean Vuong, author of the best-selling, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, for a reading at University of Pittsburgh 2/25.