Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. African & African American Studies. Art. Music. OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW offers three folios from editors Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and Douglas Kearney. Celebrating the ingenious work of contemporary literary giant and MacArthur genius grant winner John Keene, editor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews presents the folio "Counter/Narratives: An ASAP/10 Roundtable in Conversation with John Keene." Documenting conversations at the New Orleans ASAP Conference roundtable, Andrews contributes to a sustained engagement with Keene's work, experimental Black art, and the "broader and ever-unfinished task of writing (and re-writing) Black historiography." The folio closes with a response from Keene. In the folio "What Do We Tell Freedom, Now? Emancipation & Art," editor Khanyisile Mbongwa invites writers, curators, and artists to "share their perspectives on emancipatory practices. The contributors take us on various paths and reflections on the relevance of creativity within the spectrum of emancipation." This work coincided with Mbongwa serving as chief curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale, allowing her to "to explore and examine what the cre-ative industries offer to the struggle for liberation and, at the same time, how the Stellenbosch Triennale can position itself within the biennales, festivals, and megaexhibitions existing in Africa and the world." For the final folio, "See What I'm Saying Is: Writing + Image," editor Douglas Kearney invited writers to select a song from Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun and compose a cover using text and image. Following this opening of the folio, the section "Unprompted, But On-Time" consists of work composed without prompting. "More specifically, what's gone down up in here is the contributors have worked writing + image, as in writing writing into image, writing and/by/with/along/on/under/over image, and even photographic images of writing in which the textual object's depth and width isn't simulated by vectored stacking, but feral in the three-dimensional world."
Author Bio
Poet, sound artist, and scholar Duriel E. Harris is the author of three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including DRAG (Elixir Press, 2003) and NO DICTIONARY OF LIVING TONGUE (Nightboat Books, 2017), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award finalist. Harris is Professor of English at Illinois State University and Editor of OBSIDIAN'S SPECULATING FUTURES (Downstate Legacies, 2019) and OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW (Downstate Legacies, 2020).
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. She is also the author of two volumes of poetry: BETWEEN (Finishing Line Press) and A Brief History of Fruit (University of Akron Press); and editor of OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW (Downstate Legacies, 2020).
Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including BUCK STUDIES (Fence Books, 2016), SOMEONE TOOK THEY TONGUES (Subito, 2016), MESS AND MESS AND (Noemi Press, 2015), THE BLACK AUTOMAN (Fence Books, 2009), and his newest collection, Sho (Wave), is forthcoming in 2021. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and is editor of OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW (Downstate Legacies, 2020).
Khanyisile Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based curator, award winning artist, and sociologist. Mbongwa was a Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Creative Arts at UCT, where she completed her Master's in Interdisciplinary Arts, Public Art and Public Sphere. Currently she works with Norval Foundation as Adjunct Curator for Perfomative Practices and with Cape Town Carnival as Curatorial and Socio-Critical Development advisor. Mbongwa is Chief Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale and editor of OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW (Downstate Legacies, 2020).
Author City: USA