Poet and non-fiction writer Evie Shockley, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-New Brunswick, will give a reading September 15, 4:30 in Kirby 104.
Shockley collaborated with Grossman Visiting Artist Alison Saar on an artist’s book, writing the text, a poem, “mami wata (or how to know a goddess when you see one.)” The book will be included in Saar’s exhibition Breach, the result of Saar’s creative research into the relationship between African Americans and rivers. The paintings, multi-media installations and sculpture are informed by the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, an event that had a profound impact on the life of African Americans living in the Mississippi Delta.
Shockley is author of the new black, winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, and the forthcoming semiautomatic, among other collections; published the critical study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry; contributed a chapter, “Gothic Homelessness and African American Experience,” to Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America (Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity), 2010. She serves as creative writing editor of Feminist Studies.