“And what shall we do, we who did not die?”: A Reckoning with June Jordan
Live transcription is available here.
During this harrowing year, many have returned to June Jordan and her contemporaries in search of wisdom and provocations to guide us through the calamities of our time.
The title of this event comes from the title essay of June Jordan’s acclaimed collection, Some of Us Did Not Die (2002), which was adapted from the keynote lecture she delivered at the conference marking BCRW’s 30th anniversary in November 2001. As we mark BCRW’s 50th twenty years later, we find her words as prescient as ever.
Asha Futterman (BC ’21), Conor Tomas Reed, Talia Shalev, Evie Shockley, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan will join us to read from her work and reckon with its enduring significance.
This event is part of the 46th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Art and Political Imagination.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided.
Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP here.
About the Speakers
Asha Futterman (BC ’21) is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Africana Studies and English with a concentration in creative writing. She is also a research assistant at BCRW and an investigative researcher at the Invisible Institute.
Conor Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican/Irish multi-gendered street scholar and freedom maker who teaches Africana Studies and American Studies at Brooklyn College. Conor is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a participant in Free CUNY and Rank and File Action (RAFA), and in online and print circulation via AK Press, Mask Magazine, The New Inquiry, Verso, and Viewpoint Magazine. Conor is completing a book, New York Liberation School, about the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Feminist Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City from 1960 to the present.
Talia Shalev is a teacher, scholar, and poet. She is a co-editor of June Jordan’s “Life Studies,” 1966-1976 and Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974, both published through Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Her writing appears in The Seattle Review, The Volta, Cream City Review, and Women’s Studies: an inter-disciplinary journal. Talia teaches as a lecturer at the Stevens Institute of Technology and holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current research project is Some Inarticulate Major Premise: Poetry, the Will of the People, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections are the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017); both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer and LA Times Book Prizes. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, and winner of the 2018 Judith Markowitz Award for LGBTQ Writers. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best New Writing, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, Public Books, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, BET.com, and others. She has earned support and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her forthcoming book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), explores the politics of poetic experimentation in global black women’s art, literature, and hip-hop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, and is completing a novel.
Accessibility
Live captioning and and ASL interpretation will be provided.
Information on how to tune in will be provided.
Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. Please register here.