Free Community Talk: Activist Poetics

After the "Affect and Audience: Activist Poetics" symposium at UW during the day, there will be a free evening of intersectional, social justice-centric, poetic performance. Featured speakers—all of whom have been inspired by "the surge of public and digitally inflected social movements...such as #Blacklivesmatter, #sayhername, #blacktranslivesmatter"—will perform poems that "will add texture to the contemporary conversation in literary criticism that asks where the new avant garde in poetry is going." The featured speakers are Alexis Pauline Gumbs (founder of the multimedia education initiative School of Our Lorde), Kai M. Green (Assistant Professor of Queer Theory and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara), Fabian Romero (writer, performance artist, and activist), Carmen Gimenez Smith (Editor-in-Chief of Puerto del Sol, publisher of Noemi Press, and Associate Professor at New Mexico State University), and Layli Long Soldier (recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship).