“CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES: HISTORY, HEROES & HEALING” – PANEL

Room 8302 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)

DIANNELY ANTIGUA’s Good Monster presents a raw and innovative poetry collection that navigates themes of trauma, chronic pain, and mental illness. MERLE COLLINS’ Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings offers a poetic exploration of Little’s life, intertwining historical narrative with the power of imagination to illuminate a figure often overshadowed by her famous son. GEOFFREY PHILP’s graphic novel My Name is Marcus introduces readers to Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican icon who ignited a global movement for social justice. Together, these works offer profound insights into the history, heroes, and healing that define the Caribbean experience. Moderated by poet, blogger, and radio host SHARON CORINTHIAN.

Whiting Award–winning poet Diannely Antigua (Good Monster) and National Book Award finalist Danez Smith (Bluff) are joined by Oregon Public Broadcasting host and producer Jenn Chávez to reflect on the role despair and violence, hope and resilience play in their latest poetry collections.

About Good Monster:

With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body’s capacity to cage and cradle sadness.

Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection “voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope,” chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths–a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s “soft harm”–the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When “God [becomes] a house [she] can’t leave,” language becomes the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, a series of Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries–an invented collage form using Antigua’s personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.

About Bluff:

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem–part map, part annotation, part visual argument–offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love–those given and made–are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Room 2504AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, February 8, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm

 Combating stigmas and shame culture surrounding mental health, writers share poetry, nonfiction, and cross-genre work that embraces autism spectrum disorder, Anxiety, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar, and depression. These writers refuse to hide from or mask within an ableist society and through content and form, call attention to the creative powers of neurodiversity. They will share their work and discuss how their craft choices transform neurotypical language into a neurodiverse universe.

Participants

Moderator: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, PhD, writes poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother (Wick Poetry Prize, KSU Press, 2019), Don't Touch the Bones(Lost Horse Press, 2020), and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of six books of poetry and the poet laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts. His most recent book The Diaspora Sonnets was published in 2023 with Liveright Press. He is a founding member of Kundiman and teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in theLow Res MFA Program at PLU.

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American author of two books of poetry. Poems from her new collection, Bianca, were awarded Poetry's Bess Hokin Prize and have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, Eugenia serves as a poetry editor at Adroit Journal.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second collection Good Monster is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. She received her MFA from NYU.

Allison Blevins, a queer disabled writer, is the author of Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled, Slowly/Suddenly, and five chapbooks. Her next collection is forthcoming from Persea Books. She is the director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana.