National Sawdust+ Talk:
“Incident” by Amiri Baraka read by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Visual Text include references & lines from
Allen Ginsberg’s “America”
Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried”
Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Tickets
About this NS+ Talk
Two bold voices come together for a provocative National Sawdust+ conversation: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose brave, sobering, and lyrical work spans poetry, photography, and mixed media, and pioneering editor Chris Jackson, whose category-defying books have re-shaped the literary narrative at large. The intimate talk will span subjects such as beauty and resistance, and transforming politics and conflict into art.
Each is fueled by a passionate, courageous sensibility that has yielded narratives that challenge and move us, reflecting the world in which we live today – Griffiths’s current Poets House photography exhibition (American Stanzas: 2006-2016) that “marries lyrical and visual cartographies in which race, gender, sexuality, imagination, history, and language orbit each other.” The New York Times Magazine has credited Jackson with “building a black literary movement.” Now, at the helm of the newly-revived One World *imprint, he intends to “explore ideas that help to re-imagine our politics, culture, and interior lives, without the filter of dominant culture… captur[ing] the world in its fullness for this moment.”
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015), was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Griffiths’ third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose), was selected as the winner of the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Griffiths’ literary and visual work has appeared widely including The New York Times, LA Review of Books, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Guernica, Transition, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and many others. Her visual work has been exhibited nationally and is included in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Currently, American Stanzas: 2006-2016, a showcase of photography and mixed media, is on exhibition at Poets House.
Chris Jackson
Chris Jackson is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of One World, a just re-launched imprint of Random House. Previously, Jackson was an Executive Editor at Spiegel & Grau from its founding in 2006, where he edited prize-winning and bestselling authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Eddie Huang, Jill Leovy, Matt Taibbi, Victor LaValle, and Jay Z. His forthcoming One World authors include Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Alex Wagner, Quiara Hudes, Molly Crabapple, Marwan Hisham, and Binyavanga Wainaina. His own writing has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, The Paris Review, and Callaloo among other places. Jackson is a native of New York, where he currently resides.
Photos of Chris Jackson by Shaniqwa Jarvis
