Join us on November 5th and 6th as BathHouse Events and the
Creative Writing Department welcomes Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant!
Readings by Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium
And:“Textual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices”
A Discussion with Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Wednesday, Nov. 6th 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium
Texual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices
The aesthetic and formal roots of African diasporic cultural
production are often determined in relation to oral tradition, from
poetic expression and practical education, to transmission of
cosmologies and the genealogical storytelling of village griots.
Celebrating and analyzing solely the oral can come at the expense of the
written word, from signs and pictographs of ancient Egypt or Haiti, to
the ‘spirit writing’ of African American mediums and healers. In
response to this enduring but insufficient binary thinking, Tisa Bryant
and Douglas Kearney devised the concept Textual Orality. Textual Orality
is a way of naming this site of generative tension within African
diasporic literature. Using this concept as a critical frame, Bryant and
Kearney will explore the ways in which both the (il)legible and aural,
the stylized mark and the spoken word, experiments in writing and
traditions in performance (or vice-versa), are distinct and
interdependent features of their individual writing practices and
pedagogies.
Tisa Bryant:
Though she hails from Boston, received an MFA from
Brown University, and lives in Los Angeles, Tisa Bryant grew into her
writing within San Francisco’s vibrant literary/arts communities,
serving in various capacities with ATA, CineLatino, Frameline, New
Langton Arts, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Small Press
Traffic, and Intersection for the Arts, among others. She is the author
of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of
hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and
visual art; co-editor/founder of the ongoing cross-referenced journal
of narrative and storytelling, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries,
an anthology of black gay men’s desire and survival, nominated for a
2010 LAMBDA Literary Award. Bryant is currently on a reunion tour with
the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating
the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts
exhibition and reading series and she teaches fiction and experimental
writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute
of the Arts.
Douglas Kearney:
Poet/performer/librettist DouglasKearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence
Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry
Series. It was also a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in 2010. His
newest chapbook, SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps) is available. Red Hen Press will publish Kearney’s third collection, Patter,
in 2014. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award
and fellowships at Idyllwild, Cave Canem, and others. Two of his
operas, Sucktionand Crescent City, have received grants from the MAPFund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent Citypremiered
in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach
ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in
Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty and the Poetry Foundation. Raised in
Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita
Valley. He teaches at CalArts.
