Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two

A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two - April 2022

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A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two

Black Study: Spring 2022
April 4, 2022 (All day) to April 7, 2022 (All day)

Monday April 4th, 6:30 PM EST

Black Sound as Liberation Technology: a virtual event curated by K. Henderson, featuring poet and artist Anaïs Duplan, musician Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, & poet Taylor Johnson.

Tuesday, April 5th, 6:30 PM EST

Drawing from Home: a virtual event curated by Yona Harvey, featuring writer & cartoonist Ebony Flowers and graphic novelist Rina Ayuyang, moderated by Pittsburgh illustrator Marcel Walker.

Wednesday, April 6th, 6:30 PM EST

A 1-hour, virtual Generative Comics Workshop with Ebony Flowers. Co-presented with the Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project.

Thursday, April 7th, 6:30 PM EST

Artifacts of Time Travel: curated by Diana Khoi Nguyen and featuring poet Tongo Eisen Martin, nonfiction writer Kao Kalia Yang, and poet Victoria Chang as participant-moderator. This event was in-person and on campus at Frick Fine Arts Auditorium.

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Black Sound as Liberation Technology
April 4, 2022 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
A virtual event curated by K. Henderson, featuring poet and artist Anaïs Duplan, poet and musician Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, & poet Taylor Johnson.

What is the connection between Black sounds and improvisation? How does improvised sound activate Black physical, mental, and spiritual freedom?

In the first event of A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two, our guests will hold a conversation in creative practice on music, poetry, and other sounds as a past and future means of Black liberation. Based on Camae Ayewa's concept of jazz as a form of liberation technology, these award-winning artists were invited to share their response to this theme through the intimate act of improvised or in-progress work in any medium.

Inheritance by Taylor Johnson
Call Number: PS3610.O383396 I54 2020
ISBN: 9781948579131
Publication Date: 2020
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption. Item number: 31735074222609
I Need Music by Anaïs Duplan
Call Number: PS3604.U654 I64 2021
ISBN: 0900575115
Publication Date: 2021
In his fourth book, AnaÏs Duplan reinvents ekphrasis as an act of devotion to art as both the sense-archive and future tense of Black embodiment. In this vibrant thinkspace (where thinking is singing), Duplan hosts a vivid community of Black musicians, performers, painters, photographers, poets, critics, filmmakers and video artists, even a chorus of lovelorn chatroom denizens. I NEED MUSIC hosts the lyric re-arrivals of unquiet pasts, enacts a haptic intimacy with the present, and vibrates with the immanence of Black, queer futures. Item number: 31735074222690
Blackspace by Anais Duplan
Call Number: NX512.3.A35 D87 2020
ISBN: 9781939568328
Publication Date: 2020
Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology--luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey--Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book. Item number: 31735074222559
Take This Stallion by Anais Duplan
Call Number: PS3604.U654 A6 2016
ISBN: 9781936767458
Publication Date: 2016
"I have never before read a book like Anaïs Duplan's TAKE THIS STALLION. Her major talent is recognizing the self in the other, making for poems that flow forward in a tone of oneness—is oneness a tone?—poems that make evident an ever-expanding world by opening themselves up into that world. This debut does what poets in their fifth or sixth collections are still trying to figure: it balances the intellect, image, music, and emotion in ways so unfamiliar that a blurb couldn't possible characterize the work."—Jericho Brown Item number: 31735071799252
Analog fluids by Camae Ayewa
Call Number: PS3601.Y49 A76 2019
ISBN: 9780996005081
Publication Date: 2019
Accompaniment to Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, sophomore album by Moor Mother. Item number: 31735074222302
Fetish Bones by Camae Ayewa
Call Number: PS3601.Y49 F48 2016
ISBN: 9780996005043
Publication Date: 2016
In her debut book of poetry Camae Ayewa is speaking about life beyond the gaze. She speaks about the multitudes of survival and resistance when it comes to the expansive lives of those that have come into her space of creation, both physical and spiritual. Her poetry is rooted in a practice she has created called "Anthropology of Consciousness," which invokes an understanding that spiritual energy is not stagnant but continuous in every dimension as spiral and boundless information. Fetish Bones shares the same title as her debut album Fetish Bones by Moor Mother released fall 2016 on Don Giovanni Records. Item number: 31735074222310

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Drawing From Home
April 5, 2022 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
A virtual event curated by Yona Harvey, featuring writer & cartoonist Ebony Flowers and graphic novelist Rina Ayuyang, moderated by Pittsburgh illustrator Marcel Walker.

The second event in A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two, “Drawing from Home” will braid together the ideas of intimacy and resisting, particularly how cartoonists and genre-writers do some of this work, resisting tradition in many forms while creating comics, illustrations, and storytelling that is wholly intimate. The guests will also discuss how in a world where access to groups or geography can exclude or put some on the fringes, intimacy is sometimes born out of these moments of exclusion or rejection.

Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers
Call Number: PN6727.F5869 H68 2019
ISBN: 9781770463486
Publication Date: 2019
Debut examining the culture of hair from the Rona Jaffe Foundation award-winning cartoonist. Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into black women's lives and coming-of-age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. Throughout Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers re-creates classic magazine ads idealizing women's need for hair relaxers and products. Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through these stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking. Item number: 31735071740934
Blame This on the Boogie by Rina Ayuyang
Call Number: NC1429.A98 A2 2018
ISBN: 9781770463189
Publication Date: 2018
Inspired by the visual richness and cinematic structure of the Hollywood musical, Blame This on the Boogie chronicles the adventures of a Filipino American girl born in the decade of disco who escapes life's hardships and mundanity through the genre's feel-good song-and-dance numbers. Rina Ayuyang explores how the glowing charm of the silver screen can transform reality, shaping a person's approach to childhood, relationships, sports, reality TV, and eventually politics, parenthood, and mortality. Ayuyang's comics are as vibrant as the movies that she loves. Blame This on the Boogie is Ayuyang's ode to the melody of the world, and shows how tuning out of life and into the magic of Hollywood can actually help an outsider find her place in it. Item number: 31735071801512
Whirlwind Wonderland by Rina Ayuyang (Created by)
Call Number: NC1429.A94 W45 2009
ISBN: 9780979746550
Publication Date: 2009
The life-altering exploits of a somewhat-normal Filipino-American girl as she meanders through sleepy suburban sprawls, empty diners, fantasy-filled commuter traffic jams, misplaced football fanaticism, ethnic identity crash courses, and just good ole family hi-jinx. New and old stories written and drawn by Rina Ayuyang, creator of Namby Pamby, a mini-comic that explores the humorous side of life's ordinary moments. Item number: 31735074222567
CHUTZ-POW! Superheroes of the Holocaust by The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh (Produced by); Marcel Walker (Editor, (various roles)); Wayne Wise; Vince Dorse (Artist); Yona Harvey; Emily "Birdie" Harris; M. L. Walker (Artist, (various roles)); Mark Zingarelli (Artist); Erica Chan (Artist)
Call Number: PN6728.C48 W58 2014
ISBN: 9780578616551
Publication Date: 2019
CHUTZ-POW! Superheroes of the Holocaust is an acclaimed and ongoing comic-book series created and published by The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh that seeks, as its mission, to place stories of UpStanders’ courage, resilience, and sacrifice at the forefront of Holocaust awareness. Each volume is an anthology by award-winning creative collaborators, telling true-life stories of heroic survivors who brought light into some of the darkest recesses of World War II. Item number: 31735071798353 (vol. 1) 31735071798361 (vol. 2) 31735071798379 (vol. 3) 31735071798346 (vol. 4)

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Artifacts of Time Travel
April 7, 2022 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
“Artifacts of Time Travel,” curated by Diana Khoi Nguyen and featuring poet Tongo Eisen Martin, nonfiction writer Kao Kalia Yang, and poet Victoria Chang as participant-moderator. This event will be in-person and on campus.

The final event in A CAAPP Black Study on Intimacy Part Two, "Artifacts of Time Travel," nods to the fluid travel each of these writers do in their creative work: moving through archives, histories, and narratives across time. In these fraught local, national, and global times, we might reflect on the various intimacies between those we are close with, but also how one can surprisingly find oneself in intimate conversation with strangers. The event will engage with the past and present, how they entangle on the page (and in person) as we orient our thinking toward the future moment.

Location and Address
Frick Fine Arts Building: Auditorium
650 Schenley Drive, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 T74 2022
ISBN: 9781556596322
Publication Date: 2022
A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called "wakas," each poem is shaped by pattern and count. Item number: 31735071801272
Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 D43 2021
ISBN: 9781571313928
Publication Date: 2021
A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Item number: 31735074222591
Obit by Victoria Chang
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 O25 2020
ISBN: 9781556595745
Publication Date: 2020
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living. Item number: 31735072897931
Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 B37 2017
ISBN: 9781556595165
Publication Date: 2017
Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie--perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent." Item number: 31735074222542
The Boss by Victoria Chang
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 B67 2017
ISBN: 9781944211431
Publication Date: 2017
Written in ?a breathless kind of fury," the poems in award-winning poet Victoria Chang's virtuosic third collection The Boss dance across the page with the brutal power and incandescent beauty of spring lightning. Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful?the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity. Item number: 31735071800746
Salvinia Molesta by Victoria Chang
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 S25 2008
ISBN: 9780820331768
Publication Date: 2008
Victoria Chang's collection takes its title from what many call ""the worst weed in the world,"" a plant so rapidly and uncontrollably invasive that it is illegal to sell or possess in the United States. Chang explores this image of vitality and evil in three thematically grouped sections focusing on corporate greed, infidelity and desire, and historical atrocities, including the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China and the massacre of Chinese people in Nanking by Japanese troops in World War II. Item number: 31735059854723
Circle by Victoria Chang; Jon Tribble
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 C57 2005
ISBN: 0809326183
Publication Date: 2005
Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T'ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq. Item number: 31735048339364
Somewhere in the Unknown World by Kao Kalia Yang
Call Number: HV640.4.U54 Y364 2020
ISBN: 9781250296856
Publication Date: 2020
From "an exceptional storyteller," Somewhere in the Unknown World is a collection of powerful stories of refugees who have found new lives in Minnesota's Twin Cities, told by the award-winning author of The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet. All over this country, there are refugees. But beyond the headlines, few know who they are, how they live, or what they have lost. Although Minnesota is not known for its diversity, the state has welcomed more refugees per capita than any other, from Syria to Bosnia, Thailand to Liberia. Now, with nativism on the rise, Kao Kalia Yang--herself a Hmong refugee--has gathered stories of the stateless who today call the Twin Cities home. Item number: 31735074222534
The song poet : a memoir of my father by Kao Kalia Yang
Call Number: F615.H55 Y36 2017
ISBN: 9781250131881
Publication Date: 2017
In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet--a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America's Secret War. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. The songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a St. Paul housing project and on the factory floor, until, with the death of Bee's mother, they leave him for good. Item number: 31735071799237
The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang
Call Number: E184.H55 Y36 2008
ISBN: 9781566892087
Publication Date: 2008
In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death,The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family's captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang's family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Item number: 31735058153499
Blood on the Fog by Tongo Eisen-Martin
Call Number: PS3605.I8275 B58 2021
ISBN: 9780872868755
Publication Date: 2021
Politically astute, filled with wisdom and great humanity, this is poetry meant to conjure a healing and provoke a confrontation, an invitation to a journey through Black America. A rhapsodic follow-up to Tongo Eisen-Martin's Heaven is All Goodbyes, this collection further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of Black experience. These poems honor intellectual tradition and ancestral knowledge while blazing an entirely new path, recording and replaying the poet's sensory travels through America, from its packed metropolises to desolate anytowns. Radical, outraged, knowing, wry, and deeply humane, these are poems of survival that soar with a vision of collective liberation. Item number: 31735074222682