| Description | A poetry reading and conversation with Dawn Lundy Martin and Layli Long Soldier Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet and activist, author of three books of poetry, and co-editor of The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004), which uses a gender lens to describe and theorize young activist work in the U.S. In 2016, Martin co-founded with poet Terrance Hayes, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh. A creative think tank for African American and African diasporic poetry and poetics, CAAPP brings together a diversity of poets, writers, scholars, artists, and community members who are thinking through black poetics as a field that investigates the contemporary moment as it is impacted by historical artistic and social repressions and their respondent social justice movements. She is the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation (New York), an organization, which was for 15 years the only young activist feminist foundation in the U.S. Martin continues her work in collaboration with foundations and activist organizations to research and strategize about protecting the lives and freedoms of women and girls. Her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, (2015) won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Good Stock, Strange Blood is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2017. Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010) and the forthcoming Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her work interrogates poetic form and the legacy of a history of brutality and extermination. Her collection, Whereas, continually asks questions of both the reader and the author as Long Soldier considers the way Native American identity can be expressed on the page—what language should be used, what rules should be followed? What does authenticity or authorship mean when so much of one culture has been wiped out by another? She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and is poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. A citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, she resides in Tsaile, AZ on the Navajo Nation and is an English faculty member at Diné College. For more information about the Convergence Zone please click HERE>> |
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