Roundtable

Famously, Derrida wrote: “Why archive this? Why these investments in paper, in ink, in characters? Why mobilize so much space and so much work, so much typographical composition?” 

In this moment when history is being rewritten and erased, writers must rely on practices that give them the freedom to chronicle daily life honestly and urgently. Confessional serial writing such as diary, cronicas, essays, notes, fragments, and letters, opens up an important path towards not only the cultivation of personal and historical archives, but also longer creative projects.

Born in New Orleans on April 18th, 1925, Bob Kaufman stands out as one of the most eclectic poets of the mid-twentieth century. Strongly affiliated with the Beat Generation, Kaufman’s blend of jazz and surrealism earned him the moniker “The Black Arthur Rimbaud” and a dedicated readership in France. While significant recovery work has been done on Kaufman in recent years, little of it brings Kaufman back to his southern roots.

How can poetry become a radical call to action in a world facing down the Anthropocene and climate change? This panel explores how language can create transformative and radical acts of subversion, reveal the physicality and form of our commodification of nature, and wander into a speculative future that embraces collective witness.

In this roundtable event, panelists will discuss the rendering of purity culture in the Southern Gothic style. The American South has a complicated relationship with women’s bodies as the centers of desire and fear, a theme that often appears in Southern Gothic poetry—and a theme that contemporary women poets twist and unravel to display the underbelly of what it means to define women in terms of abjection, repulsion, and distortion.  Poets raised in the multifarious purity cultures of the South wrestle with claiming and queering their sexualities through lenses of race,

This roundtable features five emerging and established, multigenerational BIPOC writers who simultaneously mark, push against, and make permeable the concept of genre and poetry genre boundaries. Starting with the question: “Is genre as much a performance as identity?” They will discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of writing within genre constraints, and perhaps even challenge the notion of form as destiny. Panelists include Rob Arnold, jason b. crawford, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Anastacia-Reneé, and Rone Shavers. 

To be is to sing the aesthetic poison of colonial historicity. For poets whose families and histories emerge from the lands sometimes called Mesoamerica, there is always a question of relation and separation. How to relate to the archives of Mesoamerica from which so many have been forcibly separated and alienated? How to bring the archives of the archaic into contemporary poetics?

As Mexico is honored as this year’s guest nation, this roundtable brings together five of the most distinctive and internationally resonant voices in contemporary Mexican poetry: Hugo García Manríquez, Sara Uribe, Karen Villeda, Román Luján, and Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola.

This roundtable gathers poets and poet-translators working in Korean, English, Filipino, Tagalog, Spanish, and Persian to explore writing concurrently in multiple languages without assuming equivalence or other normative translation ideas. Each participant will open with a brief reading, then discuss how their multilingual practices are shaped by their values, identities, and politics.

This panel looks at the legacy of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo—an anonymous collective of writers who took to X (formerly Twitter) in 2015 to challenge what they saw as the white supremacist ethos of conceptual poetry—a decade after their formation.