Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: Close Reading the Emergency! (Part Two)

Close Reading the Emergency! (Part Two) - March 2023

graphic of close reading the emergency

CAAPP’s spring Black Study series “Close Reading the Emergency! (Part Two)” will run the week of March 20th-24th and consist of two exciting, on-campus main events.

Wed. March 22nd: Marwa Helal & Quenton Baker in Creative Conversation, 6:00pm at Heinz Chapel

Thu. March 23rd: Evie Shockley & Damon Young in Creative Conversation, 6:00pm at Heinz Chapel

Poet and essayist Marwa Helal

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marwa-helal
Author of Ante body (Nightboat, 2022) & Invasive Species (Nightboat, 2022)

Poet Quenton Baker

http://quentonbaker.com/ | https://poets.org/poem/we-are
Author of ballast (Haymarket, 2023)

Poet and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Evie Shockley

http://evieshockley.com/bio/ | https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/evie-shockley
Author of Semiautomatic (2017); Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011); The New Black (2011); A half-red sea (2006)

Essayist and memoirist Damon Young

https://www.damonjyoung.com/ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Young_(writer)
Author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker (Ecco, 2019) (nominated for an NAACP Image Award)

Marwa Helal

Author of Ante body (Nightboat, 2022)

Invasive Species (Nightboat, 2020)

Quenton Baker

ballast (Haymarket, April 2023)

Banana [ ______ ] / we pilot the blood (2021)

Evie Shockley

Suddenly We (March 2023);

Semiautomatic (2017);

Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011);

The New Black (2011);

A half-red sea (2006);

The Gorgon Goddess (2001)

Damon Young

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker (Ecco, 2019)

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Close Reading The Emergency!: Marwa Helal & Quenton Baker in Creative Conversation

Poets Marwa Helal & Quenton Baker will read fresh work, share creative conversation, & participate in an audience Q&A. Together, in black study, they will work to close read the contemporary emergency. There will be a book-signing in partnership White Whale Bookstore to follow.

Marwa Helal was born in Al Mansurah, Egypt. She earned her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University and her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School. She is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). Her work appears in the journals Apogee, Hyperallergic, Boston Review, Poets & Writers, Winter Tangerine, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry volumes 2 and 3, Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Halal If You Hear Me, and BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic. She has edited the Poetry Project’s Newsletter and serves on the advisory board of The Offing.

Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem, among others. She has presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Their current focus is black interiority and the afterlife of slavery. Their work has appeared in The Offing, Jubilat, Vinyl, The Rumpus and elsewhere. They are a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. They were a 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence and a 2021 NEA Fellow. They are the author of we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing, 2021) and ballast (Haymarket Books, 2023).

Location and Address:

Heinz Chapel
University of Pittsburgh
South Bellefield Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Ante Body by Marwa Helal
Call Number: PS3608.E38527 A58 2022
ISBN: 9781643621425
Publication Date: 2022
An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic. Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism. Item number:
Invasive Species by Marwa Helal
Call Number: PS3608.E4255 I58 2019
ISBN: 9781937658939
Publication Date: 2019
In Invasive species, Marwa Helal's searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees--the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language. Item number: 31735072387503
Ballast by Quenton Baker
Call Number: PS3602.A5868 B35 2023
ISBN: 9781642599022
Publication Date: 2023
A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery. In 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the ship Creole. 135 people escaped chattel slavery that day. The event was recounted in US Senate documents, including letters exchanged between US and British consulates in The Bahamas and depositions from the white crew on the ship. There is no known record or testimony from the 135 people who escaped. Their story has been lost to time and indifference. Quenton Baker's ballast is an attempt at incomplete redress. With imagination, deep empathy, and skilled and compelling lyricism, Baker took a black marker to those Senate documents and culled a poetic recount of the Creole revolt. Layers of ink connect readers to Baker's poetic process: (re)phrasing the narrative of the state through a dexterous process of hands-on redactions. ballast is a relentless, wrenching, and gorgeously written book, a defiant reclamation of one of the most important but overlooked events in US history, and an essential contribution to contemporary poetry. Item number:
Banana [ ] / We Pilot the Blood by Paul Hlava Ceballos; Quenton Baker; Christina Sharpe (Foreword by); Torkwase Dyson (Artist)
Call Number: PS3608.L36 B36 2021
ISBN: 9781734407181
Publication Date: 2021
This tête-bêche (head-to-toe) book is more than the sum of its parts: two poetic accounts of Empire by two different writers. Assembled from Senate documents detailing the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole, Quenton Baker's "we pilot the blood" considers the position of blackness and the ongoing afterlife of slavery. Paul Hlava Ceballos's "Banana [ ]" collages declassified CIA documents, corporate reports, horticultural papers and personal accounts into a bloody portrait of multinational exploitation. Between these lyrical interrogations is a contemplative interval conducted by the writer and scholar Christina Sharpe in collaboration with Torkwase Dyson's "Hypershapes." Item number: 31735074224969

graphic of close reading the emergency

Close Reading The Emergency!: Evie Shockley & Damon Young in Creative Conversation

Poet Evie Shockley & creative nonfiction writer Damon Young will read fresh work, share creative conversation, & participate in an audience Q&A. Together, in black study, they will work to close read the contemporary emergency. There will be a book-signing in partnership White Whale Bookstore to follow.

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, poet Evie Shockley earned a BA at Northwestern University, a JD at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English literature at Duke University. The author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea (2006) and the new black (2011), Shockley is also the author of the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011). Her poetry and essays have been featured in several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (2010), A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets on the Line (2011), and Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2013). Her new collection, suddenly we will be published March 7, 2023 by Wesleyan University Press.

Damon Young is the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays”--a tragicomic exploration of the angsts, anxieties, and absurdities of existing while Black in America, and the winner of Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.

He is also the co-founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and a columnist for GQ. He has written for the Atlantic, Esquire, NY Mag, The Undefeated, Lit Hub, Ebony, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Currently, Damon is the creator and host of a podcast with Crooked Media, “Stuck with Damon Young.”

Location and Address:

Heinz Memorial Chapel
University of Pittsburgh
South Bellefield Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young
Call Number: E185.97.Y632 A3 2019
ISBN: 9780062684301
Publication Date: 2019
From the host of podcast "Stuck with Damon Young," cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in America For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as "How should I react here, as a professional black person" and "Will this white person's potato salad kill me" are forever relevant. What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young's efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It's a condition that's sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the "being straight" thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to "Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies." And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity. Item number: 31735066775341
Suddenly We by Evie Shockley
Call Number: PS3619.H63 S84 2023
ISBN: 9780819500236
Publication Date: 2023
Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream - and work - toward a more capacious "we" In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it,choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming. - after Alison Saar's Blue Bird Item number: 31735074227244
Semiautomatic by Evie Shockley
Call Number: PS3619.H63 A6 2017
ISBN: 9780819577436
Publication Date: 2017
Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomaticinsists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomaticculls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future. Item number: 31735073395083
Renegade Poetics by Evie Shockley
Call Number: PS310.N4 S56 2011
ISBN: 9781609380588
Publication Date: 2011
Beginning with a deceptively simple question--What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as "black"?--Evie Shockley's Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century. Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists' and activists' insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets--in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander--generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Item number: 31735061457531
The New Black by Evie Shockley
Call Number: PS3619.H63 N49 2011
ISBN: 9780819571403
Publication Date: 2011
A profound and uplifting meditation on the meanings of race and belonging in America Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012) Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley's the new black integrates powerful ideas about "blackness," past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago--for example, the election of an African American president--will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades--changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. Item number:
A Half-Red Sea by Evie Shockley
Call Number: PS3619.H63 H35 2006
ISBN: 0932112536
Publication Date: 2006
In a half-red sea, Evie Shockley is 'dreaming the lives of the ancestors.' Navigating against prevailing currents, these poems sail on eddy and backflow, taking inspiration from knots and twists of American history and culture. Whether improvising between the lines of a slave narrative in 'henry bibb considers love and livery,' amplifying Lady Day's most devastating blues in 'you can say that again, billie,' or going freestyle with 'double bop for ntozake shange,' Shockley's imagination travels every which away. In 'a thousand words' and other reflections on contemporary events, Shockley's firm grounding in history adds weight and depth to her observations of the recent past and present. --Harryette Mullen, Advance Reader Item number: 31735073396743