Reading
mayfield brooks & Tammy Nguyen
The Poetry Project and the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y are very pleased to present an evening of readings and conversations on writing, form and Black Life with Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe.
Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature surveys eight volumes of poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and a new long poem on the diaspora and quotidian disasters. “Brand is without question one of the major living poets in the English language. Nomenclature is an invaluable and important text for poetry readers,” wrote John Keene.
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019. Her work is “gorgeous and heartbreaking,” writes Daphne A. Brooks. “It is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility.”
Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, a series of 248 notes on history, art, language and Black life, “imagines a new model suffused with grace, subtlety, rigor and care for how to read and think with and against, which is to say, to produce true and lasting knowledge,” wrote John Keene.
This event is part of the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series and will take place at the 92nd Street Y.
