Charis welcomes Donika Kelly in conversation with Nikky Finney for a celebration of The Renunciations: Poems. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection by the award-winning poet Donika Kelly, we find the home that one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing". This event is co-hosted by the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History.

Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and, in adulthood, the breakdown of a marriage, Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma.

Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa.

Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, The World Is Round, and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2020.

This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage

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The Renunciations: Donika Kelly in conversation with Nikky Finney