SEEING RED: RAGE, WRITING, ART

OCT 15, 22, 29, NOV 5, 12(*Requires separate registration), 19

7:10 to 8:45 p.m. 

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.      

Oct 15:  Anne Waldman, Naropa University 

ANNE WALDMAN: Poet, performer, professor, literary curator, cultural activist has been a prolific poet and performer for many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. She was one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Diana di Prima in 1974. She continues to work with the Kerouac School as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of its Summer Writing Program.  Her forthcoming books are Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House, 2021) and Mesopotopia (Penguin, 2022).

Oct 22:  Frances Richard, California College of the Arts                

Frances Richard is the author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (University of California Press, 2019), and co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005); she is the editor of I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School (The New School/Duke University Press, 2019), and Joan Jonas is on our mind, a volume of essays on the artist (Wattis Institute, 2017). Her books of poems include Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003). She is senior editor at Places journal and lives in Oakland CA.

Oct 29:  Khary Polk, Amherst College  

Khary Oronde Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948 (UNC Press, 2020). A child of an African American military family, his new book examines how the movement of Black soldiers and nurses around the world in the early-to-mid twentieth century challenged U.S. military ideals of race, nation, sexuality, and honor. Polk has written for the Studio Museum of Harlem, The Journal of Negro History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Gawker, and the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His work has also appeared in a number of queer and queer of color anthologies, including If We Have To Take Tomorrow, Corpus, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, and Think Again. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on race & the American imagination, military history, Black sexuality, and queer theory.

Nov 5:  sidony o'neal, Reed College 

sidony o’neal (b. 1988) is an artist and writer based in Portland, OR. Recent exhibitions include Sculpture Center, Fourteen30 Contemporary, and the Institute for New Connotative Action. Performances as a part of non-band DEAD THOROUGHBRED have been presented at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, Performance Space New York, and If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam). o’neal’s writing has been published at Arts.Black and the journal of Women & Performance. A chapbook, LYFE IN A BOTTLE TREE BOTTLE, is forthcoming from House House Press. o’neal is the recipient of the Oregon Art Commission’s 2020 Joan Shipley Award and is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland.

*Nov 12:  Morgan Parker, Morton Marcus Poetry Living Writers Reading

*Register for Morton Marcus: https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/virtual-morgan-parker-morton-marcus-poetry-reading/

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. Parker lives in Los Angeles. 

Nov 19:  Dawn Lundy Martin, University of Pittsburgh

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Dec. 3: Student Reading

https://creativewriting.ucsc.edu/news-events/living-writers-series/index.html