Northwestern Events Calendar

Feb
22
2017

Moore Speaker in Creative Writing: Aracelis Girmay

When: Wednesday, February 22, 2017
5:15 PM - 6:45 PM CT

Where: Harris Hall, Room 108, 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Elizabeth Foster   (847) 467-2981

Group: Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Some Schools of Effort and "Seeing"

In response to the various traumas triggered this past election year (these being a result of the very and various "brutal imaginations," to borrow from Cornelius Eady, upon which this country continues to be built), I wanted to reach toward certain schools of effort and seeing. In preparation for this talk I have gathered made-things by artists whose work has carried my blood and thinking into new rooms of possibility. I’ve gathered notes on work by artists who sometimes dismantle boundary, artists who sometimes break (or re-member) time, artists who have, in nuanced and quietly radical ways, altered what I before thought possible. I’d like to think through/trace some of what I’m calling their “craft routes toward possibility,” thinking specifically about some of the consequences, implications, and windows of such imaginative practices.

Aracelis Girmay is the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, which was published by George Braziller in 2005. She has also written three books of poems: Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), and the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016). Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts. Before joining Hampshire's faculty, Girmay taught community writing workshops with young people for several years, at which time she worked with the ACTION Project, a teen arts and social justice program in the Bronx. She received her B.A. in documentary studies from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. She has received grants and fellowships in support of her projects from the NEA, Civitella Ranieri, the Jerome Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Cave Canem Foundation, among other programs. For the past few years, she has been studying texts and other materials that, through form, language(s), diction, and gesture, perform and think about place and loss of place (or displacement), and what this sometimes has to do with the sea.

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