Free Community Talk: Activist Poetics

ACCESSIBILITY NOTE:
The venue is wheelchair accessible and we will have a scent free seating area for audience members who have chemical sensitivities.

Join us for “Activist Poetics”, a FREE night of performance that blends poetry, intersectionality, and social justice at the Central Library.

Each of our selected performers have been inspired by—and deeply engaged with—the surge of public and digitally inflected social movements. Hashtags such as #Blacklivesmatter, #sayhername, #blacktranslivesmatter have become incantations, the poetic phrases that have helped mobilize social movements via social media and other digital networks. Building new solidarities as they go.

The poems performed will add texture to the contemporary conversation in literary criticism that asks where the new avant garde in poetry is going. Is it as Cathy Park Hong (Sarah Lawrence College; poetry editor of The New Republic) has suggested, that contemporary activist poetics is the new avant-garde? Or something else?

We strive to bring these conversations to the larger Seattle community and celebrate the voices of poets who are fusing their practices of activism and poetry.

The evening is part of a day long event, which begins with a daytime symposium at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Everyone is welcome to the symposium as well. Details for that event are here:

https://simpsoncenter.org/projects/affect-audience-digital-age-activist-poetics
http://activistpoetics.tumblr.com/

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (PhD in English, African & African American Studies and Women & Gender Studies from Duke University), founder of the School of Our Lorde, an inter-generational multi-media education initiative;

Kai M. Green (Assistant Professor of Queer Theory, Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara) Scholar, poet, and filmmaker.

Fabian Romero (PhD Student, University of Washington Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies) Writer, performance artist and activist.

Carmen Gimenez Smith (Associate Professor, New Mexico State University) Poet, writer, editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol and publisher of Noemi Press.

Layli Long Soldier (English, Diné College), recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship.

This program is made possible by the Seattle Public Library Foundation; The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington; The School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell; and the University of Washington School of Law.