Event 4 in Black Is...Black Ain't  | Black Study 2.0

It's a new year and a new Black Study. Welcome to "Sounds and Re-Sounds, the fourth event in our Black Study 2.0 series: Black Is...Black Ain't.

This event will engage poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet Natalie Diaz, and writer and performance artist lê thị diễm thúy in a conversation about sound and boundary.  Curated and moderated by Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Photo credit: Photo of lê thị diễm thúy by Edward Judice

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). They are an associate professor at UMass Boston where they direct the MFA in Creative Writing program.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem,  was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

lê thị diễm thúy—is a writer and solo performance artist. She is the author of the novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), the solo performance works, Mua He Do Lua/Red Fiery Summer, the bodies between us, and Carte Postale, and the installation sông song / river song. She has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and United States Artists.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics’ (CAAPP) Black Study 2.0 series, “Black is…Black Ain’t” features poet and translator Rosa Alcalá,  transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´, poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet Natalie Diaz, poet Terrance Hayes, poet Ladan Osman, poet-journalist Jacqui Germain, culture writer/scholar Lauren Michele Jackson, filmmaker Tayarisha Poe, writer and performance artist lê thị diễm thúy, poet and visual artist Aldrin Valdez, poet Divya Victor, and poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña. The series is organized around various themes while all exploring ideas of Blackness’s fugitivity, its runaway state, how it can attach to other bodies who must then take up a disparaged subjectivity, and, too, creativity.

In this Black Study series, CAAPP’s programming will be intentionally African diasporic and in conversation with the range of Indigenous and displaced peoples of color. In this Study, we focus our collective curatorial lens on creating, rethinking, working together to shift inherited categories and ideas of race/black/etc. We might think of the virtual events as connected to the following thought experiment: what if together in community we try to upend the blatant, subtle, and invisible modes of domination using our creative practice?

We hope you'll join us for the entire series!

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

"Of Sounds and Re-sounds" ft. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Natalie Diaz, & lê thị diễm thúy (moderated by Diana Khoi Nguyen)