Poetry and the Senses Launch and Conversation

Indira Allegra is re-imagining what a memorial can feel like, the scale on which it can exist and how it can function through the practice of writing, performance, sculpture and installation. Their work has been featured in exhibitions at The Arts Incubator in Chicago, John Michael Kholer Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Mills College Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton, 808 Gallery, The Alice Gallery and SOMArts among others. Their commissions include performances for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland and SFJAZZ Poetry Festival. Allegra’s work has been featured by BBC Radio 4, Art Journal, KQED and Surface Design Magazine. They were the recipient of the Artadia Award, Tosa Studio Award, Windgate Craft Fellowship and Jackson Literary Award and has received support from the Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, MAP Fund and Queer Cultural Center. Allegra is a former Lambda Literary Fellow, their writing has been widely anthologized, and they have contributed works to 2019 Lambda Literary Finalist Foglifter Magazine, 2012 Lambda Literary Finalist Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two Spirit Literature, Canal Magazine, Cream City Review, HYSTERIA Magazine, make/shift Magazine, and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought among others.

Chiyuma Elliott is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Stegner Fellow, Chiyuma’s poems have appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is the author of two books: California Winter League (2015) and Vigil (2017).

Lyn Hejinian teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which are Positions of the Sun (Belladonna, 2019) and Tribunal (Omnidawn, 2019).