One week after Election Day, Black feminist scholars will examine the current socio-political and cultural moment in “Triangle Breathing: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, moderated by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon," associate professor of English.
REGISTER HERE to attend this free event!
"We will think through the implications of the 2020 elections, including the necessity for police reform, and discuss how, since the murder of George Floyd, what has happened in the U.S. has become a matter of global attention. Topics will include the Black Lives Matter movement and the state of law and order. How can 'law and order' be assured in a society of such breathtaking lawlessness?"
Hortense Spillers is considered a foundational figure in Black feminist scholarship. A literary critic and brilliant essayist, Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Since receiving her PhD from Brandeis, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory and Cornell Universities, among others. She lectures widely both at home and abroad, and is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. Her collection of scholarly essays, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), includes her landmark 1987 article, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”—one of the most cited essays in African American literary studies. Her co-edited works include Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. She co-founded with Tamura Lomax The Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to providing socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist, racist, and imperialist politics.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a self-described Queer Black Troublemaker and a Black Feminist Love Evangelist. As the first person to do archival research in the papers of Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Lucille Clifton while achieving her PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University, she honors the lives and creative works of Black feminist geniuses as sacred texts for all people. Her triptych of experimental works, published by Duke University Press, includes Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018) and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). Gumbs’ poetry and fiction appear in many creative journals and has been honored with inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award. She is currently Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies, as well as in residence as a National Humanities Center Fellow. Find out more at www.alexispauline.com.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Leading with a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle and Poems in Conversation and a Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective, and in 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women’s suffrage and the fight for political equality, at National Theatre London.
This is the fourth and final event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. The Zalaznick literary series brings renowned writers to Cornell to share their work. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
