Please join us for a public lecture by poet, scholar, and 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist Evie Shockley.

This talk comes from Shockley's project on "Black Graphics," which considers the combined visual-verbal strategies contemporary black artists have used to negotiate problems associated with representations of embodied blackness. Here, she takes up the most recent books by Renee Gladman, reading them alongside work by Hank Willis Thomas and June Jordan, to bring Gladman's black feminist thinking into view.

Evie Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include the critical study "Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry" and three volumes of poetry -- most recently, "semiautomatic," published by Wesleyan in 2017, and "the new black," winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Her creative and critical writing has been published widely and supported by fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/NYPL, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She is currently at work on a project entitled "Black Graphics: Slavery, Colorblindness, and Contemporary Black Aesthetics.”

This event is sponsored by Critical Contemporary Studies, the Poetry and Poetics Workshop, the Helen Zell Writers' Program, and the English Department.