Jack Jones Literary Arts Speakers Bureau Necessary, Provide Profes- for More Information Or Extends This Ambitious Endeavor

Jack Jones Literary Arts

Speakers Bureau Jack Jones Literary Arts

Speakers Bureau Jack Jones Literary Arts creates publicity The Jack Jones Literary The Jack Jones Literary campaigns for bold, forward-thinking, literary Arts Speakers Bureau Arts Speakers Bureau writing that moves readers. Since our inception in offers an efficient process roster is unparalleled. We that will help you book represent an eclectic mix, 2015, Jack Jones Literary Arts has been ensuring one of our clients for your including award winners that underappreciated and unorthodox writers— next reading, lecture Angela Flournoy, John especially black women, women of color, and series, or any other Keene, and Terese Marie queer women—receive the attention they deserve. engagement with ease. Mailhot. Our clients are Through its book project campaigns, a writing Once you’ve provided us inspiring speakers who can with the details, we will cover any range of topics. retreat for women of color, workshops, and advo- work with you and your By choosing one of our cacy work in both digital and print verticals, Jack chosen speaker to ensure clients for your event, you Jones Literary Arts is diversifying the literary scene, that each aspect of the will be featuring a dynamic changing the way we think about literature, and process is executed seam- and creative voice that will amplifying the voices of those we need to hear. lessly. We will work as a assuredly enhance your liaison in the days leading programming. up to the event and, if The Jack Jones Literary Arts Speakers Bureau necessary, provide profes- For more information or extends this ambitious endeavor. Understanding sional support during the to view or download a the need for a bureau that focuses on literary engagement. client’s press kit, please writers of color, cultural capital, and career devel- visit jackjonesliteraryarts. Unsure of whom to invite? com/speakers-bureau. If opment, we’ve built an impressive roster of writers Discuss your needs with us. you would like to book a to fill that void. Our speakers can expertly discuss Let us use our expertise to speaker, please complete any number of subjects, from a wide range of help you identify the right the online form or write to craft topics to non-literary topics, such as inter- speaker for your event. We Allison Conner at allison@ sectional feminism, race and popular culture, are also glad to brainstorm jackjonesliteraryarts.com. with you potential topics or money and career. Each one of our speakers that you might wish to is engaging and provides fresh and innovative have our client address or perspectives on crucial and interesting issues. discuss with your audience.

2 3 “Soon Quincy and Russell spilled into the hallway. They saw Cha-Cha, P all elbows and fists, swinging at the haint. It had let go of Cha-Cha's collar and was now on the defensive. R Quincy would later insist that the haint emitted a blue, electric-looking light, and each time Cha-Cha's fists O connected with its body the entire thing flickered like a faulty lamp.”

S —Excerpted from speaker Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, E Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

4 5 Gabrielle Civil

Artist Statement: As a black feminist performance artist, poet/writer, and community arts activist, I am passionate about art, identity, creative practice, and social change. With dynamism and verve, I have welcomed diverse audiences at universities, conferences, libraries, museums, and community centers. My artist talks, performance-lectures, and workshops tackle art & activism, black women’s creative expression, embodying justice, artful questions, body love, multicultural education, and experiments in joy. I have also facilitated book club conversations about my own book Swallow the Fish and books by other authors. The aim of my work is to open up space.

P Biography: R Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered almost fifty original performance O art works around the world including a year-long investigation as a S Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy after the 2010 earthquake in E Haiti. Recent performances include “Q&A” (Chicago), “a ritual of nest and flight” (Toronto); and “…hewn and forged….” (Salt Lake City). Since Almore Aly credit: Photo May 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. Her art writing has appeared in The Third Rail, Art21, Small Axe, and Obsidian. Her essays and translations have appeared in Something on Paper, Aster(ix), and Two Lines. Her memoir-in-performance-art Swallow the Fish was named by Entropy a “Best Non-Fiction Book of 2017.” She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. For the 2017- 2018 academic year, Civil served as the Laura C. Harris Scholar-in-Resi- dence in Women’s & Gender Studies at Denison University. She currently teaches MFA Creative Writing courses and BFA Critical Studies courses at CalArts. Her next book Experiments in Joy will be published by CCM in February 2019.

6 7 Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Artist Statement: I grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, the daughter of an ex-communist intellectual and a psychic from a line of seers. I am attracted to politics and magic like moth to a light. In my essays and stories I investigate the shifting grounds of knowledge involved in understanding the world and the self. My novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a story of political conflict born into the lives of children and explores issues of class, privilege, luck, and gender and how girls and women navigate these landmines of powerlessness. It is an immigration story, drawing on the complex experience of crossing a border, where the resounding fullness of the Photo credit: Jeremiah Barber self is also revealed to be a cavity. English isn’t my mother tongue, but it is the one I choose as an immigrant whose sense of home has relied for P many years on unbelonging. Both in my writing and life I am impressed by what can be translated and what is irredeemably untranslatable. R I gravitate toward stories that are marginal: I have written about losing O my memory after a bike accident, interviewed former guerrilla members, S and am currently working on a family memoir about my grandfather, a curandero who it was said had the power to move clouds. E

Biography:

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday, 2018). She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She currently teaches writing to immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing artists into public schools. She is the book columnist for KQED.

8 9 Desiree Cooper

Artist Statement: As a Pulitzer Prize-nominated columnist, award-winning author, former attorney and a former public radio personality, I’ve dedicated my career to lifting the voices of women and children. I am an engaging speaker on the themes of racial and gender equality, reproductive freedom, family-positive public policy, and the welfare of women and girls. Caught between caregiving for my aging parents, launching my millennial children and supporting my grandchildren, I write widely P about women, self-care and reinvention. I am a skilled creative writing R workshop facilitator who conducts readings from her latest book, Know the Mother, like an “instant book club.” O

S Biography: E A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Detroit community activist whose fiction Millhouse Justin credit: Photo dives unflinchingly into the intersection of racism and sexism. Using the compressed medium of flash fiction, she explores intimate spaces to reveal what it means to be human. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Her debut collection, Know the Mother, was published by Wayne State University Press in March 2016. Desiree Cooper is based in Virginia.

10 11 “I’ve thought so often, Phoebe said, of the idea that longing should be allowed the chance to find its object. Since desire pleads to have more, I’ll inhabit that space. It’s a privilege to have loved: with each loss, P I’ve gained practice in the divine. P R I haven’t given up loving my mother R O O S just because she died. If she’d taken S E a trip, the love wouldn’t end. It’s not E so different, except that I haven’t known when, and if, she’ll return.”

—Excerpted from speaker R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, Riverhead Books

12 13 Tananarive Due

Artist Statement: I speak on artists and activism, social justice, Afrofuturism, writing (craft), Octavia E. Butler and the rise of black science fiction, and fantasy and horror as tools for resistance. In addition to being a novelist and screenwriter, I co-authored a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, with my late mother, civil rights leader Patricia Stephens Due.

Biography: P Tananarive Due is a former Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman R College (2012-2014), where she taught screenwriting, creative writing O and journalism. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program S at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a E civil rights memoir. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. Due has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. In addition to Voices of our Nation (VONA), Due has taught at the Hurston Wright Foundation’s Writers’ Week and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Tananarive Due is based in Southern California.

14 15 Angela Flournoy

Artist Statement:

My novel The Turner House explores identity, family history, urbanism and The Great Migration, among other topics. My craft topic presentations include: Researching the Historical Novel, Dialogue and Code-Switching in Fiction, Perspective and POV in fiction, and the role of time and memory in creative writing. P Biography: R Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for O the National Book Award and a New York Times notable book of the year. S The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, E the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP

Image Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree John Midgley credit: Photo for 2015. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Flournoy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Iowa, the New School, and Columbia University.

16 17 Kaitlyn Greenidge

Artist Statement: Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and this is the guiding principal of my work. Whether it is fiction about the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism in American life; the historical context of black girl sadness in the latest Netflix obsession; or the literary prece- dents of the latest Zadie Smith novel, my fiction and cultural criticism are always concerned with answering the question, “How did we get Photo credit: Syreeta McFadden here?” In my own past, I have extensive experience in education reform and digital education efforts; historical interpretation; and the power P and craft of fiction writing. Ultimately, I work from the belief that stories without context can only get us so far. People armed with stories and the R right kind of knowledge can be dangerous. O S Biography: E Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of The New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, The Wall Street Journal, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study other places. She was a contributing editor for LENNY Letter and is currently a contributing writer for The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

18 19 Ravi Howard

Artist Statement:

The art of fiction is an art of make-believe. When I first read the quote by Albert Murray, I wanted to keep it at the center of my approach to writing and recreating historical moments, some real and some made real through the process and craft of writing. My speaking engagements give me a chance to share my interpretation of Murray’s idea and my views on teaching, writing, and building aesthetic communities. P R Biography: O Ravi Howard is the author of two books of fiction, Like Trees, Walking S (HarperCollins, 2007) and Driving the King (HarperCollins, 2015). He has received fellowships and awards from the New Jersey Council on the

E Arts, the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Beri Irving credit: Photo and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to being selected as a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Like Trees, Walking, his first novel, won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence (2008). He has taught fiction at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, the Kimbilio Fiction Retreat, and Minnesota North- woods, and he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Florida State University.

20 21 Mira Jacob

Artist Statement:

Write for us. I have those three words from Kiese Laymon taped above my desk to remind myself what is possible when you allow yourself to imagine what others don’t, or won’t, or simply can’t. When I was a kid, I never saw lives like mine—Indian, queer, feminine—represented in American culture, and it left me with a curious blankness inside, a series of question marks in the place of milestones. How do you become fully realized in a country that renders you invisible? How do you chart your own depths when others need constant explanation of your surface? For me, the answer has come through imagining a life the culture could not—whether that’s through writing a novel from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. over ten years (The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing), or teaching myself to draw so I could Photo credit: In Kim illustrate a graphic memoir (Good Talk), or learning to write screenplays P to make that memoir into a television show. Whether I am speaking on identity, or presenting a craft talk on subtext in dialogue, or talking to R fellow artists about jumping genres, I am always informed by the same O urgency—to find my way to us. S

Biography: E

Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conver- sations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, The Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

22 23 “My mother was a Star of the Morning. My father was a Saturnite. I was first an Infant Auxiliary Star, and then I was a Girl Star, then a Young Lady Star, and three years ago, right before Mumma and Pop drank a jigger of cyanide each, P P R I became, in my own right, a full- R O blown Star of the Morning, Fifth O S House, Second Quadrant Division, S E E North Eastern Lodge of the colored hamlet of Spring City in the town of Courtland County, Massachusetts.”

—Excerpted from speaker Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman, Algonquin Books

24 25 Kima Jones

P “Kima Jones is taking the R publishing industry by storm.” O S E —The

New York Times Oriana Koren credit: Photo

26 27 John Keene

Artist Statement: “We are representing our various selves.” This Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) quotation is one of many that reflects my experiences as an artist, a writer, a translator, and a thinker. It points to the core of what I aim to do as a creative person and what I believe my art contributes: to represent the richness, the variety, the complexities, of the world around me, the worlds in and of which I am a part. I also follow Toni Morrison’s model of creating work I have long wanted to see in the world but seldom do. Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation This approach suggests all kinds of aesthetic possibilities for represen- tation and presentation, for creation and performance. In my artmaking, I acknowledge and draw upon numerous artistic and cultural traditions, yet also proceed from the standpoint of no fixed or set models, because my desire is to be as true to what I am creating and striving to represent as possible, and I follow where the artwork’s demands take me. With P my writing, I often strive to capture the social, political, and economic complexities of the past, present, and future, through a late twentieth/ R early twenty-first century black queer perspective. Based on this partic- O ular point of view, I also have long been interested in what lies just on the S other side of language’s capacity to capture and convey human experience, which is to say, the ineffable, the strange, the sublime. E

Biography: John Keene is a writer, translator, and literary advocate. His recent books include Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), a collection of stories and novellas; the art book GRIND (ITI Press, 2016), an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner; and the poetry chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016). He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including a MacArthur Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Whiting Foundation Prize for fiction. He also has translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014). He chairs the department of African American and African Studies, and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark, and blogs at J’s Theater.

28 29 R.O. Kwon

Artist Statement:

The Incendiaries, my first novel, is about a woman who gets involved with a group of fundamentalist Christians. It turns out to be a cult with ties to North Korea, and the cult ends up bombing five buildings. I grew up deeply religious, then left the faith while I was in high school. A lot of people exist on just one side of the belief spectrum: they know what it is to believe in a god, or they have no idea at all. In my writing, I want to P cross that giant rift, to show each side what the other’s worldview can look like. I can also speak about religion in fiction, craft, writing and R politics, and revision. O S Biography: E R.O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries, published by Riverhead. The Incendiaries is an American Booksellers Association Indie Next #1 Photo credit: Smeeta Mahanti Smeeta credit: Photo Great Read and Indies Introduce selection, and it is being translated into four languages. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born in South Korea, she has mostly lived in the United States.

30 31 Terese Marie Mailhot

Artist Statement: My work is an expression of where I’m from. I was rez raised, had kids

Photo credit: Mark Woodward young, married young, existed underneath all the stigmas and stereo- types, subverted them, and now I’m something else—a bestseller. I’m liberated, and I’ve liberated myself through art. P R Biography: O Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. She graduated with an S MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She served as Saturday Editor at The Rumpus and was a columnist at Indian Country Today. Her E writing appears in West Branch, Guernica, Pacific Standard, Elle, and elsewhere. She is the author of The New York Times bestselling Heart Berries: A Memoir. She serves as faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts and she’s a Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University.

32 33 “My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity—like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.

Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn’t P thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men P R and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. R O I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and O S took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, S E I realized I had given men too much. E

The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men’s questions or their calls. Women asked me for my story.”

—Excerpted from speaker Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries: A Memoir, Counterpoint Press

34 35 Lilliam Rivera Artist Statement: With my background first as an entertainment journalist and now as a young adult author and fiction writer, I am interested in sharing my unique publishing journey and the transformative nature of literature for young, reluctant readers. My forthcoming YA novel, Dealing in Dreams, tackles questions of gender roles and the use of violence as a tool for power in a near future world. My first novel, The Education of Margot Sanchez, explores class and race in the Latino community, gentrifica- tion in the South Bronx, and the perils of addiction. My craft workshops include ways to mine personal history for compelling fiction, how to tackle tragedy in young adult fiction, and an exploration of speculative literature.

Biography: Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of the young adult P novels Dealing in Dreams, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on March 5, 2019, and The Education of Margot Sanchez, available now in bookstores R everywhere. The Education of Margot Sanchez was nominated for a 2019 O Rhode Island Teen Book Award, a 2017 Best Fiction for Young Adult S Fiction by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and has been featured on NPR, New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, E MTV.com, and Teen Vogue, among others. Photo credit: Vanessa Acosta Vanessa credit: Photo She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 Clarion alumni with a Leonard Pung Memorial Scholarship. Lilliam has also been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA, A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Speculative Literature Foundation. Her short story “Death Defiant Bomba” received honorable mention in Bellevue Literary Review’s 2014 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by author Nathan Englander. She recently received honorable mention in the 2018 James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.

Lilliam’s work has appeared in Lenny Letter, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, Latina, USA Today, Cosmo for Latinas, Bellevue Literary Review, The Rumpus.net, and Los Angeles Review of Books, to name a few. She has been a featured speaker in countless schools and book festivals throughout the United States and teaches creative writing workshops. 36 37 “Tonight feels different. The weight of her absence hits me. On most nights when my crew and I patrol the streets of Mega City, I feel a sense of invincibility mixed with glee. Violence can do that to a person, especially when you’re the one unleashing it. At night my crew, Las Mal Criadas, own these streets. Not tonight. We’re missing one of our girls, and the warm breeze that blankets my face is a trick meant to seduce me into thinking everything is fine. My soldier Manos Dura. She didn’t have to go out like that. No one deserved that ending.

“Go check the building.” Truck, my right hand, barks out an order. One of my soldiers sprints ahead. It’s been almost a P month since the end of Manos Dura, and we’re still feeling P R it. It was Truck who recruited and trained her to be the R O fifth in our all-girl gang. Manos Dura’s specialty was her O S fists. No one ever wanted to catch them hands. She was S E good, and now she’s gone. The last thing I want to do is be E out here patrolling. Such is my lot in life. It’s what Las Mal Criadas do. Not for long, though.

“Does she see any stragglers?” I ask Shi, my soldier in charge of intel. She checks the Codigo5G goggles. The machine is run-down, an old model. We’re lucky to have them. Only top crews are authorized to be connected to the server. These Codigos were a gift from Déesse, our beloved leader of Mega City. We have access to the libraries and the ability to transmit.”

— Excerpted from speaker Lilliam Rivera’s Dealing in Dreams, Simon & Schuster

38 39 Rion Amilcar Scott

Artist Statement: In my writing I explore the breadth and depth of the humanity found within the black experience using the mediums of flash fiction, short stories, novellas and novels, as well as essays and satirical pieces. My work examines identity, masculinity, rebellion, and the frequent absurdity of day-to-day black life. No matter what form my work takes, the goal is always to present complexity in the face of the historical

Photo credit: Rebecca Aranda distortion of black representations.

Biography: P Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the PEN America/Robert W. Bingham R Prize for Debut Fiction winning short story collection Insurrections O (University Press of Kentucky). Insurrections was awarded the 2017 S Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Rion’s work has been published in journals such as the Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard E Review, PANK, The Rumpus, Fiction International, the Washington City Paper, among others. A story of his earned a place on the Wigleaf Top 50 (very short) Fictions of 2016 and 2013 lists, and one of his essays was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2015. He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and earned an MFA from George Mason University where he won both the Mary Roberts Rinehart award and a Comple- tion Fellowship. He is a Kimbilio fellow. His sophomore story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You, and his debut novel are forthcoming from Liveright/Norton.

40 41 One of Esquire’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019:

“A bold new talent emerges with this boundary- P shattering collection of linked stories set in fictional P R Cross County, Maryland, founded by the leaders of R America’s only successful slave uprising. Characters O O range from robots to sons of God in these magical S realist stories about race, religion, and violence. S E Think of it as Faulkner meets Asimov.” E

Speaker Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You, Liveright/Norton, August 2019

42 43 P O “I’m reading any poet that E Kima Jones represents.” T —Roxane Gay R Y

44 45 Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Artist Statement: My writing is wide-ranging and concerns the malleability of language and forms. I am interested in the intersections of the innovative and experimental with aspects of race, gender, and the more-than-human world. My work is grounded in inquiry, ways of knowing, and how language can (and cannot) communicate experiences felt in body and mind. Even at its most cerebral my work is centered in notions of embodiment and the lived experience of seeing and being seen. My practice and process includes photographic and video work and mixed media composition. Current projects include computational poetics and emerging technologies, spell-casting, and collaborative writing. Speaking topics include creative writing pedagogy, literary craft, and computational poetics.

P Biography: O Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an Assistant Professor in the Department of E English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she teaches in T the UMass Boston MFA in Creative Writing Program. She has previously taught at St. Lawrence University, Ithaca College, and Williams College. R She was recently named the new director of the Chautauqua Institution Y Writers’ Festival. Photo credit: Adrianne Mathiowetz Adrianne credit: Photo She is the author of the poetry collections Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. Bertram’s other publications include the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books, 2012), winner of the Phantom Books chapbook award; the artist book Grand Dessein (commissioned by Container Press), a mixed media artifact that meditates on the work and writing of the artist Paul Klee and was recently acquired by the Special Collections library at St. Lawrence University; and Tierra Fisurada, a Spanish poetry chapbook published in Argentina (Editoriales del Duende, 2002). She collaborated with the artist Laylah Ali for the exhibition booklet of her 2017 art show The Acephalous Series.

46 47 Marilyn Chin

Artist Statement: Marilyn Chin is available for readings, craft talks, and workshops on poetry, fiction, and translation.

Biography: Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. She is presently celebrating the launch of her new book A Portrait of the Self As Nation: New And Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2018). Marilyn Chin’s other books of poems include Hard Love Province, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, and The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty. She has won numerous awards, including the P Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, O the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Founda- tion Fellowship at Bellagio, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/ E Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to T Taiwan, a Lannan Residency and others. R Y She was featured in Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life, and Poetry Everywhere, introduced by Garrison Keillor. She has read and taught workshops all over the world. She has been a professor at San Diego State University for over 20 years and recently, she was guest poet at universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney and Berlin, Iowa and elsewhere. In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing, Ho Xuan Huong and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu.

Presently, she is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

48 49 Dr. Ashaki Jackson

Artist Statement: Loss, which is central to my poetry, facilitates my exploration of my closeness to my grandmother, law and social perceptions of Blackness. As an applied psychologist, I examine attribution—how individuals assign causality and create narratives to make sense of what is seen. At the intersection of my interests is a struggle between the feeling of experienced loss and the narratives that witnesses create about that loss. My work builds on that conflict challenging notions that loss of P Black life is without tenderness and politics.

O Biography: E Ashaki M. Jackson, Ph.D., is a social psychologist, program evaluator T and poet. She has worked with youth moving through the juvenile justice R system through research, evaluation and creative arts mentoring for one Y decade. Her work has appeared in CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, Pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture and Prairie Schooner among other journals and anthologies. Writ Large Press published her chapbook, Surveillance, in March 2016, and a second chapbook, Language Lesson, was published by MIEL, August 2016. Jackson is also co-founder of Women Who Submit, a community that supports women in submitting their literary works to top tier journals. She earned her MFA (poetry) from Antioch University Los Angeles and her doctorate (social psychology) from Claremont Graduate University. Ashaki Jackson lives in Los Angeles.

50 51 A. Van Jordan

Artist Statement: As a poet, screenwriter, and educator, I’m interested in the intersections between art forms and how those art forms may unearth events, people, and concerns of the forgotten past. I see poetry as a visual art form as much as film is, and I think film can be as lyrical as a poem. Photo credit: Anthony Alvarez P Biography: O A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the E PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); T M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one of the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton, 2007); and R The Cineaste (W.W. Norton, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Y Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). He serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature at The University of Michigan.

52 53 Dr. Irène Mathieu

Artist Statement: As a writer and physician I am curious about how experience is embodied and transmitted across generations. I have always been interested in the stories that don’t make it into dominant narratives, and the therapeutic potential of listening to and telling these stories. In both my careers I champion diverse methodologies of storytelling that can be used subversively – from community-based qualitative research to persona poems. How might the ways in which we tell our (hi)stories help us in the pursuit of a more just and peaceful world? How might we employ language to achieve inclusive social narratives? Core themes in my work include ecopoetics, feminism, racialization/racism, intersections of privilege and oppression, silence(s), and the ethics of advocacy in both writing and medicine.

P Biography: O Irène Mathieu is a pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher E who has lived and worked in the United States, the Dominican Republic, T Guatemala, Peru, and elsewhere. She is the author of three books — Grand Marronage (forthcoming from Switchback Books in 2019), which R was selected as Editor’s Choice for the Gatewood Prize; orogeny (Trem- Y bling Pillow Press, 2017), which won the Bob Kaufman Book Prize; and chapbook the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press & studio, 2014). She has won Yemassee Journal’s Poetry Prize, received Honorable Mention and Editor’s Choice awards in the Sandy Crimmins National Poetry contest, and was runner-up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern Book Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Boston Review, The Caribbean Writer, Southern Humanities Review, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, New Delta Review, Yemassee, TriQuarterly, Foundry, and elsewhere. Irène has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She serves as an editor for Muzzle Magazine and for the Journal of General Internal Medicine’s humanities section. Irène is interested in medical humanities, social determinants of health, trauma-informed care, global public health, and medical education. She holds a BA in International Relations from the College of William & Mary and a MD from Vanderbilt University.

54 55 Airea D. Matthews

Artist Statement: My writing concerns cultural intersectionality with an emphasis on futurism, deconstruction, hybridity, philosophical inquiry, experiment, and form innovation. I am deeply interested in the interweaving of textual ancestry and history, and my work affirms that a Pan-African body can be simultaneously avant-garde and guardian of ancient— an intersection that creates a dynamic and complex relationship with

Photo credit: Jerriod Avant language. Current projects include a hybrid prose/poetic interrogation P of first-world poverty and a series of essays about neurodivergence and poetic craft. O E Biography: T Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, recipient of R the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, has received praise from Y outlets including The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Best American Poets 2015, American Poet, and elsewhere. She received the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in 2016 from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Ms. Matthews is working on her second poetry collection, broke, which explores poverty. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she researches and teaches hybridity, futurity and poetic innovations.

56 57 Khadijah Queen

Artist Statement: My writing concerns feminism/womanism across the gender spectrum, intersections between race/gender/class, art and performance, trauma and the body, hybrid genres and innovative forms, difficulty and accessibility in poetry, strategies for narrative inquiry, and how histories of place inform personal histories. Current projects include a book of poetics essays, new poems, an autobiographical novel, and a research- based prose historiography. P Biography: O E Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). As T part of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance R Writers, Litmus Press published her verse play Non-Sequitur in 2015. Y Fiona Templeton’s The Relationship theater company staged a full

production off-Broadway at Theaterlab NYC from December 10-20, Teak Michael credit: Photo 2015. Individual poems and prose appear in The American Poetry Review, Fence, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Hyperallergic, Gulf Coast, and widely elsewhere. Reviews of her work can be found in The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Kenyon Review, and other publications. Her fifth book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On was published by YesYes Books in March 2017. Queen is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of Colorado in Boulder, and serves as core faculty in poetry for the Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University.

58 59 Joseph Rios

Artist Statement: I write and speak, always, from a well-read, learned blue collar perspective. I am interested in discussions about the ways in which people of color and particularly Latinx and Chicanx folks have been kept out of the upper echelons of the literary world and how our literatures have and continue to be acts of subversion in content and form. I can do this by talking about my work and its many influences through the

Photo credit: Amy Haberland Chicana/o, Western, and African American canon. P O Biography: E Joseph Rios is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (Omnidawn). He is from Fresno’s San Joaquin Valley. He’s been a T gardener, a janitor, a packing house supervisor, and a handyman. He is R a recipient of scholarships from the Community of Writers Workshop at Y Squaw Valley and CantoMundo. He is a VONA alumnus and a Macondo Fellow. In 2015, he received the John K. Walsh residency fellowship from the University of Notre Dame. In 2016, his debut poetry collection was chosen by Claudia Rankine as a finalist for Omnidawn’s first book prize. He was named one of the notable Debut Poets by Poets & Writers Maga- zine for 2017 and was a finalist for a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellowship. He is a graduate of Fresno City College and the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Los Angeles.

60 61 Arisa White

Artist Statement: I want people to heal themselves through storytelling and locate the poetry in their lives to build narratives that are nuanced and varied, that center truth and love as power. All of which requires embodiment— rootedness in the emotional intelligence of the body. Doing so creates new pathways for creativity to emerge.

Biography: Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the poetry chapbooks Post Pardon, Black Pearl, and “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife—winner of the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. Hurrah’s Nest P (Virtual Artists Collective, 2012) was a nominee for the Phillis Wheatley Book Awards, California Book Awards, and the NAACP Image Awards. O A Penny Saved (Aquarius Press, 2012) is inspired by the true-life story E of Polly Mitchell who was held captive in her home. Roxane Gay calls T White’s newest collection, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened (Augury Books, 2016), “an assured and memorable book of poetry, one R that provokes thought as it provokes a depth of feeling.” Forthcoming Y in 2019 is the children’s book Fighting For Justice: Biddy Mason Speaks Photo credit: Nye’ Lyn Tho Lyn Nye’ credit: Photo Up, co-written with Laura Atkins, (Heyday Books) and the hybrid poetry memoir, Who’s Your Daddy? (Augury Books).

Awarded a 2013-14 Cultural Funding grant from the City of Oakland to create the libretto and score for Post Pardon: The Opera, she received, in that same year, an Investing in Artists grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation to fund the dear Gerald project, which takes a personal and collective look at absent fathers. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer people of color. She serves on the board of directors for Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Colby College. Arisa White is based out of Hallowell, Maine.

62 63 Fri., July 2, 7:07 PM “Eat, the stones a poor man breaks,”

Fri., July 2, 7:18 PM Still stale as they were when Memaw died P Half-mad on working-class P O hunger; plumpness thinned O E to a chip of lamb’s bone, E legs decayed, necrotic. T T R Fri., July 2, 7:26 PM R Y Running is a game Y for the young. Women of a certain age, root.

—Excerpted from speaker Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra, Yale University Press

64 65 Staff Index

Kima Jones, Founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts Afro-diasporic Studies Diversity & Inclusivity Latinx Studies Gabrielle Civil Ingrid Rojas Contreras Ingrid Rojas Contreras Kima Jones has received fellowships from PEN Center USA Emerging Kaitlyn Greenidge Desiree Cooper Joseph Rios Voices, Kimbilio Fiction, Yaddo’s 2016 Howard Moss Residency in poetry John Keene Kaitlyn Greenidge Lilliam Rivera and was named the 2014-2015 Gerald Freund Fellow at the MacDowell Irène Mathieu R.O. Kwon Colony. She has been published at GQ, Guernica, NPR, PANK and The Rion Amilcar Scott Khadijah Queen LGBTQ Studies Khadijah Queen Rumpus and in the anthologies Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the John Keene Arisa White Margins of History, Her Own Accord: American Women on Identity, Culture, Environmentalism Arisa White and The best seller, Irène Mathieu and Community New York Times The Fire This Time, The Business of edited by Jesmyn Ward. Her short story “Nine” received notable mention Poetry Publishing Fiction & Literature in Best American Science Fiction 2015, and her hybrid poem “Homegoing Lillian-Yvonne Bertram Ingrid Rojas Contreras Marilyn Chin Marilyn Chin AD” appears in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. Kima founded Kima Jones Gabrielle Civil Ashaki Jackson Jack Jones Literary Arts in March 2015, works as lead strategist on all Ingrid Rojas Contreras A. Van Jordan publicity campaigns, and is especially proud of her work on the 2017 Caribbean Studies Desiree Cooper John Keene Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winner, Olio, by Tyehimba Jess; the 2017 PEN Gabrielle Civil Tananarive Due Irène Mathieu America Robert W. Bingham Emerging Fiction Prize winner Kaitlyn Greenidge Angela Flournoy Khadijah Queen Insurrections Kaitlyn Greenidge Joseph Rios by Rion Amilcar Scott; and the 2017 Midland Authors Award winner in Lilliam Rivera Rion Amilcar Scott Ravi Howard Arisa White Adult Fiction, Know the Mother, by Desiree Cooper. Mira Jacob A. Van Jordan Children’s Literature The Secular & the Divine John Keene R.O. Kwon Allison N. Conner, Speakers Bureau Manager Lilliam Rivera Lilliam Rivera Irène Mathieu Arisa White Terese Marie Mailhot Arisa White Allison Noelle Conner’s work has appeared in Bitch, Full Stop, The Rumpus R.O. Kwon and elsewhere. She enjoys exploring ways in which literature and Criticism Rion Amilcar Scott Somatic Awareness publishing can realign our notions of community, activation, resistance, Ingrid Rojas Contreras Khadijah Queen and healing. She is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program at Kaitlyn Greenidge & Embodiment CalArts. Born in Ft. Lauderdale, Allison now lives in Los Angeles. Allison John Keene Gender & Women’s Gabrielle Civil Khadijah Queen Studies Irène Mathieu joined Jack Jones Literary Arts in 2017 where she trained as a junior Arisa White publicist and built out the framework for the speakers bureau. Allison is Gabrielle Civil Cultural & Linguistic Ingrid Rojas Contreras particularly proud of her publicity work on Leesa Cross-Smith’s Whiskey Translation Desiree Cooper Urbanism and Ribbons. In 2018, Allison was promoted to manager of the speakers Marilyn Chin Kaitlyn Greenidge Desiree Cooper bureau where she coordinates engagements for luminaries such as Terese Ingrid Rojas Contreras Terese Marie Mailhot John Keene Mailhot, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Angela Flournoy, and John Keene Khadijah Queen Angela Flournoy John Keene. Lilliam Rivera Arisa White Women & Money Immigration Ingrid Rojas Contreras Ingrid Rojas Contreras Kima Jones Lilliam Rivera Rion Amilcar Scott

66 67 Notes Notes

68 69 “The first time I drew a rose I couldn’t stop layering in new petals. My small right hand filled the flimsy newsprint with red Crayola spirals, the lines unbroken, the endless making as sweet as being out of the order other people like to think you are born to.”

—Excerpted from speaker Khadijah Queen’s I’m So Fine, YesYes Books

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