Black Took Collective will be reading at the University of Notre Dame in the Digital Visualization Theater on March 19, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Creative Writing Program, the Department of English, the Department of Africana Studies, First Year Studies, and Multicultural Student Programs and Services.
Black Took Collective is a group of Black post-theorists who perform and write in hybrid experimental forms, embracing radical poetics and cutting-edge critical theory about race, gender, and sexuality. The Collective comprises three members:
Duriel E. Harris is the author of two print collections: Drag (Elixir Press) and Amnesiac (Sheep Meadow Press) and the sound compilation “Black Magic” (forthcoming from Asian Improv Records). With Scott Rankin, she is co-author of the poetry video Speleology (2011), a jury selection of the 2011 International Literary Film Festival, the 2012 Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin), and the 2012 Visible Verse Festival (Vancouver). Current projects include the AMNESIAC media arts project, funded in part by the University of California Santa Barbara Race and Technology Initiative, and “Thingification”—a one-woman show. Selections from “Thingification” have been featured internationally, and it made its New York City workshop debut off off Broadway at The Wild Project for the 11th Annual Fresh Fruit Festival in July 2013. In 2014 “Thingification” will travel to Amsterdam by invitation of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Dutch Embassy. Harris is an associate professor of English at Illinois State University where she teaches creative writing and poetics. (www.thingification.org).
Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightbook Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for both Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; Candy, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books 2011); and The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her forthcoming collections include The Main Cause of the Exodus (O’clock Press 2014) and Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2014). Martin is also at work with Erica Hunt on an anthology of experimental writing by black women in North America and the Caribbean (Kore Press 2015). She has written a libretto for a video installation opera that has been chosen for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. An associate professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, Martin lives in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and East Hampton, New York.
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. Wilson is also an Assistant Professor of Poetry, Fiction and Literature in the Literature Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz. His latest books: Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other is forthcoming from Counterpath Press, and Lucy 72 will be released by 1913 Press. He was recently an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where he worked on a dance/video project, playing with elements from his sound album Off the Dome: Rants, Raps, and Meditations.
The reading is free and open to the public.