Event 3 in CAAPP's Close Reading the Emergency!

D.S. Marriott, Dante Micheaux, and Diedrick Brackens in Creative Conversation. A moderated discussion and Q&A will follow, moderated by Dante Micehaux.

“Disaster requires acts of imagination…emergency can be, and almost always is, a moment of emergence.” —Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Yale Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration

Dante Micheaux is author of Circus (Indolent Books, 2018), which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation. His other honors include the 2020 Ambit Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation.

Poet and scholar D.S. Marriott was born in Nottingham and educated at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the poetry collections Incognegro (Salt, 2006), Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008), The Bloods (Shearsman, 2011), and Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019). His chapbooks include In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). In his critical and creative work, Marriott, of Jamaican heritage, draws on postcolonial thought and thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and is the leading theorist of Afro-pessimism. His critical books include On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2000), Letters to Langston (Rutgers University Press, 2006), and Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dying of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens utilizes both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview.

Mark your calendars for CAAPP's Fall Black Study series "Close Reading the Emergency!" which will run from Tuesday, October 11th through Friday, October 14th. The series will feature a mix of virtual and in-person events and features the following invited guests in conversation and collaboration: Hanif Abdurraqib, Kimberly Drew, Namwali Serpell, Ashon Crawley, Coco Fusco,  Dante Micheaux, D. S. Marriott, Diedrick Brackens, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Torkwase Dyson, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation.

Close Reading the Emergency! ft. Dante Micheaux, D. S. Marriott, & Diedrick Brackens