Literary Events

POETRY READING WITH SASHA BANKS + JOY PRIEST
RECORDED SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

Sasha Banks is a 2019 Rhode Island Writers Colony fellow who received her MFA at Pratt Institute. Her work has been published in PBS Newshour, Apogee, Rhino, Poor Claudia, Zócalo Public Square, and Fanzine. She is the author of america, MINE.

About america, MINE:

Sasha Banks's searing debut poetry collection america, MINE is a radical conjuring of a post-white supremacist United States of America. Blending speculative poetics and historiography, Banks creates a rich revisionist account of America, in which its most fraught institutions collapse and Uhmareka emerges--layering a new, strange, and graphic landscape with the textures of supernatural happenings, ghosts, creatures, and inconsistent recollections of American histories. Spurred on by the trauma of and lack of local and national accountability for Michael Brown's murder in 2014, Banks mixes magical realism and keen rage to interrogate white supremacy's narratives, challenge its prerogatives, and usher in a future where it can thrive no longer. In so doing, these Afrofuturist poems by turns summon historical and archetypal Black figures like Fannie Lou Hamer and Aunt Jemima to the National Mall; rouse the ghosts of Tituba, Rekia Boyd, and Cynthia Wesley at the Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson; and describe a period of raucous destruction before Uhmareka is ushered in by the strange and mysterious forces that herald it. Will Black lives thrive in the re-envisioned Uhmareka, or will they struggle to balance new freedom with the lingering fear of the old ways' return? In america, MINE, Sasha Banks demands that we consider what possibility may spring forth from such imagining.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2020 Kunitz Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, APR, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, and Poets & Writers, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

About Horsepower:

Priest's debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter's waywardness as aspirational. Across the book's three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self--a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky's world-famous horseracing track--before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of "the horses & their restless minds."

* * * * *

LESLIE KERN, AUTHOR OF FEMINIST CITY
WITH KATRINA JOHNSON-ZIMMERMAN
RECORDED SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

Leslie Kern is an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women’s and gender studies at Mount Allison University. She is the author of Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship.

Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman is a lecturer, researcher, and advocate for heart-centered cities through her firm THINK.urban. She was recently named to BBC’s 2019 list of 100 Women and invited to speak at the annual event in London on the future of cities and women. As an applied urban anthropologist, her work focuses on human behavior in public space and the relationship between behavior and design.

About Feminist City:

Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.

We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.

In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.

* * * * *

CAREN BEILIN, AUTHOR OF BLACKFISHING THE IUD
W/ JOANNA HOWARD + JOANNA RUOCCO
RECORDED OCTOBER 7, 2020

In pre-COVID times, bookstore and bar sales during events helped sustain our programming. A great way to support us now is by buying the book (Blackfishing the IUD), a virtual cocktail to be enjoyed on our patio at a later date, or a gift certificate for use online. Thanks for your continued support.

Caren Beilin is the author of the autofiction Spain, the novel The University of Pennsylvania, and a collection of short fictions Americans, Guests, or Us. Her work appears in Fence, The Offing, and Territory. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the Berkshires.

Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. She is the author of the memoir Rerun Era, novel Foreign Correspondent, the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round, and Field Glass, a collaborative novel written with Joanna Ruocco. She also co-translated Walls by Marcel Cohen and Cows by Frederic Boyer. She teaches in the literature PhD program at Denver University.

Joanna Ruocco holds an MFA from Brown and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of Dan, The Mothering Coven, Man’s Companions, A Compendium of Domestic Incidents, and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych. She also works pseudonymously as Alessandra Shahbaz (Ghazal in the Moonlight, Midnight Flame) and Toni Jones (No Secrets in Spandex).

About Blackfishing the IUD:

Blackfishing the IUD is a daring and demanding memoir about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community. Rhapsodic and unabashedly polemical, Beilin scrutinizes the literary, artistic, and medical history of Rheumatoid Arthritis, as she considers the copper IUD's role in triggering her sudden onset of chronic autoimmunity. As the title makes abundantly clear, the book is an argument that the copper IUD is sickening quite a lot of women--and that we listen first and foremost to women's testimony to begin to resolve it.

* * * * *

ROBERT ROTBERG, AUTHOR OF ANTICORRUPTION
W/ DR. BONNIE PALIFKA
RECORDED OCTOBER 14, 2020

Robert Rotberg is President Emeritus of the World Peace Foundation, Founding Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Program on Intrastate Conflict, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft, Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness in the Twenty-First Century, Transformative Political Leadership, and numerous other books.

Dr. Bonnie J. Palifka is an international expert in anti-corruption studies, Associate Research Professor in the Department of Economics at the Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico), and Lecturer for Yale Summer Online. She is the founder and organizer of the Academia against Corruption in the Americas conference and has consulted for Transparency International and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The author or co-author of several books, articles, and chapters, her most recent essay is a book chapter, “Corruption, Organized Crime and the Public Sector in Mexico,” in Adam Graycar (ed.), Handbook on Corruption, Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration, Edward Elgar, 2020.

About Anticorruption:

The phenomenon of corruption has existed since antiquity; from ancient Mesopotamia to our modern-day high-level ethical morass, people have sought a leg up, a shortcut, or an end run to power and influence. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Robert Rotberg, a recognized authority on governance and international relations, offers a definitive guide to corruption and anticorruption, charting the evolution of corruption and offering recommendations on how to reduce its power and spread. The most important component of anticorruption efforts, he argues, is leadership that is committed to changing dominant political cultures.

Rotberg explains that corruption is the conversion of a public good into personal gain--either by the exchange of cash for influence or by the granting of special favors even without explicit payments. He describes successful anticorruption efforts in countries ranging from Denmark and Sweden to Canada and Costa Rica, and discusses the roles of judicial systems, investigative journalism, multinational corporations, and technological advances. He shows how the United States has become more corrupt than before, and contrasts recent US and Canadian experiences.

Without sufficient political will to eliminate corruption, it persists. Rotberg outlines thirteen practical steps for battling corruption, including removing holdover officials tainted by corruption and the public declaration of financial assets by elected officials and appointees.