Thinking Its Presence Conference 2023: Full Schedule

conference image by Vi Khi Nao & conference design by Ethan Widlansky

Thinking Its Presence: Racial Vertigo, BlackBrown Feelings, and Significantly Problematic Objects

Pomona College

THINKING ITS PRESENCE 2023:

An interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices

March 30, 2023- April 2nd, 2023

OVERVIEW

In Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and The Ends of the Model Minority, Dr. James Lee employs the condition of “cruel optimism” theorized by the late Lauren Berlant to scrutinize the ambivalent feelings Pauline Chen narrates in her memoir Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality. Lee further frames Berlant’s point by saying that “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object…the fear is that the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything.” At the Thinking Its Presence conference this year, we have invited Dr. Lee to present his work and to turn his discussion to questions of how BIPOC scholars, writers, activists, historians, and artists manage both hope and its opposite affective feelings in their works, and how attachment to “problematic objects,” systems, and institutions produce and perpetuate difficult and violent conditions for the psyche and the body. Concerning the ‘body,” Dr. Valorie Thomas’s work on racial and diasporic vertigo is of particular importance here: specifically how the body “incorporat[es] the idea of trauma, displacement and dispersal that the African diaspora has experienced through the slave trade. . . . being uprooted and dislocated—and culturally disrupted and traumatized—that’s one version of vertigo.”

We are celebrating the Claremont Colleges, California communities, and the Thinking Its Presence communities of past participants to present on these themes related to their areas of expertise (which include creative writing, scholarly, theoretical, and interdisciplinary work) and to invite their colleagues to present a set of panels related to these themes of racial and diasporic vertigo, necessary keywords in our fields, and problematic objects, through creative writing, literature, aesthetic practices, social justice, and performance studies.

TBA

INSTALLATION: The Stinky South Asian

Thinking its Presence 2023: The Stinky South Asian:
Exhibition in Crookshank Atrium from March 30-April 2nd. Cupcake Reception at 1pm March 31st

To this year's Thinking its Presence conference, this text installation offers various perspectives on the figure of the stinky South Asian body. We are interested in the role that olfactory racism plays in constructing the South Asian body in literature and broader culture: we aim to examine the racialization of smell and smelliness, and the abject body that emerges out of that process. Scent has historically been deprioritized in Western colonial ways of knowing. Colonial scientists and philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constructed a progress narrative around scent and human evolution, asserting that sight replaced smell as part of a natural process of advancement. Sigmund Freud logicked that this replacement occurred “when the human species began to walk upright, removing the nose from the proximity of scent trails.” In “Asian Sybils and Stinky Multispecies Assemblages,” Sharon Tran writes, “As sight came to be embraced as “the pre-eminent sense of reason and civilization,” smell was renounced as “the sense of madness and savagery. … Smell has … been relegated to the very bottom of the sense hierarchy as incapable of providing the kind of direct, observable, quantifiable, and enduring knowledge privileged in Western science and philosophy.” Our installation will focus on the linguistic and ideological negotiations surrounding the stinky South Asian. We will look to South Asian memoir and self-writing, including V.S. Naipaul’s nonfiction and Durga Chew-Bose’s essays; experimental writers unsettling the sense hierarchy as they build and rebuild the South Asian body, including Bhanu Kapil and Julietta Singh; as well as our personal experiences and writing practices. We will discuss stink as an axis along which the South Asian is raced and made abject, paying special attention to its relationships to ideas and fears around contamination.

Speakers

Prageeta Sharma

Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English, Pomona College

Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000... Read More →

Vidhu Aggarwal

Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of Literature, Rollins College

Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, drawing mythic schemas from popular culture, science, and ancient texts. Their poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized... Read More →

Ahana Ganguly

Ahana Ganguly is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is a second-year MFA candidate at Pratt and holds a BA in English from Pomona College. She is the submissions editor for Futurepoem and an editorial associate at Enchanted Lion Books. She works primarily in creative... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 TBA
Crookshank Atrium

9:00am PDT

Poetics and Translation: Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Michael Leong, and Vivek Narayanan

Three talk-readings by poet-translators. They will be discussing their work and recent collections.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Mel Gross

Tara Mukund

Speakers

Vivek Narayanan

Assistant Professor, George Mason University

Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S and the forthcoming After (NYRB Poets, 2022). A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public... Read More →

Micheal Leong

Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry, Kenyon College

Michael Leong is the author of the critical study "Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry" (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the poetry books "e.s.p." (Silenced Press, 2009), "Cutting Time with a Knife" (Black Square Editions, 2012), "Who... Read More →

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan, Kohl & Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Urdu, and published in journals and anthologies worldwide-- most recently in McSweeney's anthology of international poetry "In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth" 'and "Aeolian Harp" (Glass Lyre Press). Her work has... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
Crookshank Hall: Ena Thompson Reading Room

9:00am PDT

Panel: The Queer Asian Diasporic Deviants Response to Lauren Berlant's Problematic Object: A Roundtable Reading and Q & A

As Martin Manalansan articulates in his essay, “Diasporic Deviants/Divas: How Filipino Gay Transmigrants ‘Play with the World,’ “‘No longer prone to permanent rupture’ from the homeland or total subservience to the hegemonic practices of the nation, these transmigrants are living lives that transgress borders and specific localities with new means of transportation and communication in what is now called a global ethnoscape.” In this queer AAPI roundtable reading and discussion, LGBTQIA+ Asian American writers/artists pay tribute to their lineage to the kind of queer transmigration that Manalansan speaks to.
In Lauren Berlant’s “Cruel Optimism,” we implicate ourselves in proximity to the “problematic object,” a thing one desires but is also “an obstacle” to one’s flourishing and advancement. However, we risk to trouble Berlant’s theory of the problematic object of desire by intersecting a queer and trans Asian diasporic lens and embodiment to the notion of attachment and betrayal.
As queer and trans Asian cultural producers in the United States, we are acutely aware of the numerous moving parts of our lives that encompass prevailing colonized histories, ruptured lineages and ongoing violences that affect societal upward progression. Thus, what are the outcomes (of Berlant’s “problematic object”) when one is part of a queer immigrant’s lineage? Can we claim that our relationship is radically different and nuanced to the culture of economic promise when betrayal is rendered so closely to one’s history and survival? In this case, the hope for promise in a country of settlement is more folklore than fact, more propaganda than reality.
During this reading and discussion, we continue the aesthetic and survival praxis of many of our queer and trans Asian diasporic elders by employing “Play with the World” as a site of literary innovation, hybridity and deviancy in order to destabilize and expose dominant systemic and institutional conditions. In our collaboration, we center and entangle an Asian diasporic queer and trans experience and artistic experimentation.

*This will have a zoom component--several speakers will be remote speakers

ZOOM streaming link: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/86482089792

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Angela Peñaredondo

Speakers

Kay Ulanday Barrett

KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2022 Next Book Residency with Tin House, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at... Read More →

Addie Tsai

Ica Sadagat

Poet, Educator, Sadagat School of Motion and Text

Rajiv Mohabir

Thursday March 30, 2023 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

9:00am PDT

Afrofuturisms: Presentation of Pomona College's student scholarship on Afrofuturisms

Join the Claremont college community for a student-led panel on all things AfroFuturism! The event is in collaboration with the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies (IDAS) and the Office of Black Student Affairs (OBSA), Dr. Valorie Thomas will be providing an introduction and there will be both presentations and readings from the following 5C students: Nasira Watts, John West, Charleston Stoval, and Keeilah Jewell. Hear some stellar takes on AfroFuturism and its related topics and aesthetics while you enjoy some donuts!

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Valorie Thomas

Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies, Pomona College

Valorie D. Thomas is an American Africana studies scholar, consultant, and screenwriter. She is the Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Speakers

Nasira Bilqis Watts

Keeilah Jewell

Charlston Stovall

Thursday March 30, 2023 9:00am - 10:50am PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 217

9:00am PDT

Ann Kaneko: Film screening of Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust (84 mins.)

Film screening of Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust (84 mins.)

At the foot of the majestic snow-capped Sierras, Manzanar, the WWII concentration camp, becomes the confluence for memories of Payahuunadü, the now-parched “land of flowing water.” Intergenerational women from Native American, Japanese American and rancher communities form an unexpected alliance to defend their land and water from Los Angeles. https://www.manzanardiverted.com/

Independent filmmaker Ann Kaneko is known for her personal films that weave her poetic aesthetic with the complex intricacies of political reality. Often involving subjects in other parts of the world, Kaneko probes the intersection where power impacts the personal. Her films have screened internationally and domestically at numerous festivals and have been broadcast on PBS. She has been commissioned to produce media installations for the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Endowment and the Skirball Cultural Center. Her films include A Flicker in Eternity, based on the diary and letters of Stanley Hayami, a Japanese American teenager who was incarcerated and killed in battle during World War II; Against the Grain: An Artist's Survival Guide to Perú, which highlights the life and work of four inspiring Peruvian political artists under the stormy regime of ex-President Alberto Fujimori; Overstay, about foreign migrant workers in Japan, and 100% Human Hair, a zany musical set in a Korean-owned Los Angeles wig shop, made for the performers and choreographers also have been presented at the Getty Center, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) and the Highways Performance Space. Fluent in Japanese and Spanish, Kaneko has been a Fulbright and Japan Foundation Artist fellow and funded by the Hoso Bunka Foundation and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She graduated with an MFA in film directing from UCLA and taught Media Studies at Pitzer College. For the last eight cycles, she has been the artist mentor for Visual Communications' Armed with a Camera Fellowship, a program for emerging Asian Pacific filmmakers.

*Ann will be joining us via Zoom, but this will be in an in-person event.

ZOOM link: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/88354210471

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Dylan Bradshaw

Charles Morris

Isabel Navarrete

Speakers

Ann Kaneko

Thursday March 30, 2023 9:00am - 10:50am PDT
Art Dept. Screening Room (Studio Art Hall 122)

10:00am PDT

Poetry and Prose: Anuradha Vikram, Ryan Rivas, Todd Shimoda, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, and Priya Jha

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Shreya Balaji

Speakers

Todd Shimoda

novelist, publisher, Shimodaworks

Todd Shimoda’s seven novels have been described as “philosophical mysteries,” and have been translated into several languages. In 2010 the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council awarded him the Elliot Cades Award for Literature for his fiction. He is a partner in two small presses... Read More →

Anuradha Vikram

Writer, critic, and cultural organizer, UCLA

Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and educator. Vikram is co-curator (with UCLA Art Sci Center director Victoria Vesna) of the upcoming Getty Pacific Standard Time Art and Science exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (September... Read More →

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Priya Jha

Associate Professor of English, University of Redlands

Ryan Rivas

Ryan Rivas is the author of Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus, 2022) and Lizard People (ThirtyWest, forthcoming fall 2023). He is the Publisher of Burrow Press, and the Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program. A Macondo Writers Workshop fellow, his work has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

11:00am PDT

Panel: Taking It Back: Environmental Writing as an Asian American and the Ecologies of Grief

Environmental writing is a genre focused on concerns of climate change, risks to food and water security, wildlife, energy, technology, and policy. But what has brought us to this point of urgency and concern, and from whose point of view is this written from? Who created the genre, or even the idea that white people could write the history, naming, and feeling of places with a brush of settler mentality? What are self-sustaining practices of environmentalism that come from ruptured, erased histories of grandmothers?

Three writers will come together to discuss the implications of environmental writing, how it can dismiss other notions of what nature is and how nature should be seen and written about. In the context of their individual writings and multidisciplinary works on grief, trauma, and nostalgia, they will explore what it means to inhabit “involuntary memories” of ecological existence—that is, memories of the networks of family, place, materials—and how grief appears and animates those memories. As humans, we recall our ancestors and childhood memories through our sense memories, through the power of scents and tastes and sounds, through our bodies. What does it mean for diasporic Asian Americans to negotiate ecologies of grief? How can we take back the genre of environmental writing to mean a celebration of our ancestry?

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Jhani Randhawa

Speakers

Jessica Kashiwabara

Jessica Kashiwabara is a writer and editor raised in the suburbs of Southern California. Her essays and poems have been published in Black Renaissance Noire, Midwestern Gothic, PANK, Tribes, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She is the digital director at Poets & Writers and is currently at... Read More →

Rajnesh Chakrapani

Rajnesh Chakrapani is the author of The Repetition of Exceptional Weeks, Brown People who Speak English and Manifesto on Translations of Hospitality. He is a winner of a Pen/Heim Translation award and his work is placed in Asymptote, The Offing, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, The Margins... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 218

11:00am PDT

Poets Together Reading: Chloe Martinez, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Vivek Narayanan, and Ali Raz

Bios:

Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) and debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018). Currently, she teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Vivek Narayanan is one of the best-known Indian poets writing in English. His books of poetry include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the legendary Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University and is a member of the editorial board at Poetry Daily, where he helps to select poems and writes short essays about world poetry.

Ali Raz is the co-author of Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), a kooky collection of sex ads, and Alien (11:Press, 2022), a novella about an alien hunter in a paranoid city. Her work has appeared in The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:am Magazine, and elsewhere. She co-edits the literary journal Hush.

This event is sponsored by the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College
https://www.pomona.edu/administration/pacific-basin-institute/about

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Eva Molina

Speakers

Chloe Martinez

Program Coordinator of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and Lecturer, Religious Studies, Claremont McKenna College

Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry... Read More →

Vivek Narayanan

Assistant Professor, George Mason University

Ali Raz

Ali Raz is the co-author of Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), a kooky collection of sex ads, and Alien (11:Press, 2022), a novella about an alien hunter in a paranoid city. Her work has appeared in The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:am Magazine, and elsewhere... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

11:00am PDT

Tribute: "Writing Mourning: The Rites of Mourning, The Right of Mourning"

Work by bell hooks, Urvashi Vaid, and Kamilah Aisha Moon will be used as a performative site of mourning and remembrance by panelists; we’ll ask ourselves how to consider the possibilities and failures of language in light of evisceration and death. What do the lives and works of these writers and activists give us? How can we remember them? What do their deaths teach us today – in light of murderous police state and global pandemic? We will also crucially consider the ways in which America conceives and also refuses death; in what ways do distinctly American perceptions about death shape our lives and our relationships to language? Death will be considered as a dynamic condition – one which is physical, spiritual, psychological, and social – and thus transcends the logic of time and space. What social death induces for women and femmes who are Black, brown, and Asian Pacific Islanders in this country will be explored and exploded by the panelists through the performative mechanisms of text, sound, and video.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Kyla Tompkins

Speakers

Elisabeth Houston

Elisabeth Houston is a writer, artist, and performer. Standard American English, a book of experimental poetry, was recently published with Litmus Press. Performances have been staged at Human Resources Los Angeles, the Getty, the Hammer – as well as universities, prisons, and community... Read More →

Ashaki Jackson

Ashaki M. Jackson, Ph.D., is a social psychologist, program evaluator, and poet. She has worked with youth moving through the juvenile justice system through research, evaluation and creative arts mentoring for one decade. Her work has appeared in CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

11:00am PDT

Workshop: abject/object/subject>free

How does trauma manifest in bodies that labor in predominately white institutions? What embodied strategies can we use to navigate, manage, exorcise harm and move towards healing? In this experiential session, we will explore the liberatory potential of humans performing with and as objects - a notion that Anne Cheng describes in her book Ornamentalism -- and have some fun. Please wear clothes you can move freely in!

Speakers

Joyce Lu

Associate Professor of Theatre, Pomona College

Joyce Lu teaches contemporary drama and performance. She specializes in applied theatre, movement, Asian and Asian American performance, with expertise in guiding people to devise autobiographical, self-revelatory work. A certified Feldenkrais Method practitioner, she has danced with... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 11:00am - 12:50pm PDT
Pendleton Studio 210 E. Second St

1:00pm PDT

BREAK

Thursday March 30, 2023 1:00pm - 2:00pm PDT

2:00pm PDT

Gabrielle Civil: Wild Beauty: A workshop of black feminist pedagogy/ performance / dreaming

This interactive session draws inspiration from Wild Beauty, a black movement ritual/residency that Gabrielle Civil organized in January 2020 at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. For MLK Day and beyond, four Black dancers/movers/ performers talked, ate, drank, laughed, moved, time-traveled, rested, and dreamed together all in their own time. With solo, collaborative, and community elements in both public and private, Wild Beauty activated fugitive Black Space-Time and shifted resources from a predominantly white institution toward Black movement, dreaming, and rest. Similarly, this dynamic workshop will invite reading, writing, moving, resting, divination, and performance. It will share lessons from Wild Beauty, open possibilities for embodying justice, and hold space for Black pedagogy, allyship, and joy.

Speakers

Mel Gross

Gabrielle Civil

black feminist performance artist

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance art works worldwide, most recently the déjà vu—live (2022), Jupiter (2021) and Vigil (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

3:00pm PDT

Wardell Milan: The Artist and His Time: Performance and Talk

Event Description

Performance and Talk:

Titled The Artist and His Time, the muliti-medium presenation, reflects on the many ways, the artist interferes with the world. Giving much consideration to the ways in which art can expose and reflect the prejucdices of society. Acting as an agent of both provocateur and redeemer. The talk will take a focused looked at the ways in which artists have used their creative talents to comment on the troubles and joys of the world.

Introduction by Nasira Watts.

Performance by Wardell MilanWardell Milan Recent Work On View October 8, 2022 – April 2, 2023
Wardell Milan engages with the practices of drawing, photography, painting, and performance to create works of varying scales that center the representation of the human figure. Often arresting and seductive in their dramatic fragmentation of form and vibrant use of color, Milan’s work captivates and encourages sustained consideration. Sustained looking reveals the urgent social issues ever present in his practice, though not always immediately apparent. Based in New York and trained in Tennessee, Milan’s figures reflect American experience relevant to today and emerging from our collective history.
Over the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, the Benton presents Milan’s recent work in two distinct but related presentations: five monumental billboards on the campus of Pomona College, and four large works on paper in the entrance foyer of the museum.

The billboards—Milan’s first outdoor campus-based project—lead the viewer on a journey through the college. Inspired by the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, they offer a sustained meditation on the marginalized body, one for each billboard: the quarantined body, the Black body, the migrant body, the female body, and the trans body. The four works on view in the Benton’s entrance foyer similarly employ multiple techniques of image-making—photography, drawing, collage, erasure—to disassemble and reassemble the human form, examining the practice and concept of figuration itself. By making and remaking the body, and by making this process transparent, Milan exposes the emotional vulnerabilities and redemptive possibilities of the physical self, transmuting violence into beauty and isolation into belonging.
This project has been made possible by the Fund for Art in Public Places and by the Art Acquisitions and Programs Fund.

https://www.pomona.edu/museum/exhibitions/2022/wardell-milan

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Nasira Bilqis Watts

Speakers

Wardell Milan

Wardell Milan (b. 1977, Knoxville, Tennessee)Throughout his practice, Milan sustains a thoughtful inquiry into the nature of beauty and the unconscious, touching on topics such as body modification and gender performance. His most recent series, Parisian Landscapes, explores the... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

4:15pm PDT

Reception: Champagne Toast Pomona English Dept. Professor Valorie Thomas

4:30pm Toast for Dr. Valorie Thomas with Pomona College President Gabrielle Starr and Pomona College Dean Melanie Wu.

Speakers

Valorie Thomas

Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies, Pomona College

Thursday March 30, 2023 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

6:00pm PDT

Opening Remarks: Prageeta Sharma and Dorothy Wang (welcome remarks) and Valorie Thomas on Racial Vertigo

Speakers

Dorothy Wang

Professor, Williams College

Dorothy Wang is Professor of American Studies at Williams College, where she spearheaded the founding of Asian American studies. Her monograph, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), won the Association... Read More →

Prageeta Sharma

Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English, Pomona College

Valorie Thomas

Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies, Pomona College

Thursday March 30, 2023 6:00pm - 6:45pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

7:00pm PDT

Sandra Soto: Moths, Blood, Linotype: Rasquachismo in Greater Mexico

Sandra Soto Keynote talk. Introduction by Katie Kane.

Moths, Blood, Linotype: Rasquachismo in Greater Mexico

A short story about a Chicanita cleansing her abuelita’s body with homespun ritual; a feminist artist carefully pricking the fingers of poets in crowded smoke-filled cafes; a pair of lovers tending their ragtag Mexican literary journal—these affect-laden scenes of proximity, trust, and embodiment reveal across time and space the potent worldmaking of everyday art-making under constrained conditions. In this presentation, Soto ruminates on how these scenes might work together to provide counter-hegemonic salve for the gendered violence of racial capitalism in Greater Mexico. Rasquachismo provides the architecture, she argues, for Helena Maria Viramontes short story, “The Moths,” Eleanor Antin’s installation, Blood of a Poet, and Margaret Randall & Sergio Mondragon’s journal, El Corno Emplumado.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Katie Kane

Associate Professor, University of Montana

Raised in North Dakota, Katie Kane now lives in Missoula, Montana. An associate professor at the University of Montana in the English Department, Kane has published her scholarship on colonialism, capitalism, and culture in journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Cultural... Read More →

Speakers

Isabel Navarrete

Sandra Soto

Associate Professor, University of Arizona

Sandra K. Soto is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and affiliate faculty of English, the Latin American Studies, Mexican American Studies and Social and Cultural Theory at the University of Arizona. She is the former editor of Feminist Formations, and an Associate... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 7:00pm - 7:45pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

7:45pm PDT

J Finley: The Comedy of Eras

Some reflections from and evidently old comedy scholar who doesn’t understand what’s funny nowadays. Featuring a DJ set by DJ John West.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Nasira Bilqis Watts

Speakers

J Finley

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Pomona College

J Finley is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies black women’s history, performance, and cultural expression. In addition to teaching courses on the history and theoretical aspects of humor and comedy at Pomona College in Africana Studies, she also teaches her students the practice... Read More →

Thursday March 30, 2023 7:45pm - 8:20pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

9:00am PDT

Student Reading: Poetry and Prose

The Student Reading champions the voices of BIPOC student-writers at the Claremont Colleges. Rich in diversity and solidarity, it is being held in partnership with various affinity groups, including the South Asian Student Association, the Black Student Union, and the Women’s Union. Join us in celebrating the voices of our community’s writers in an environment teeming with rhythm and portraits, poetry and prose.

Friday March 31, 2023 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
Crookshank Hall: Ena Thompson Reading Room

9:00am PDT

Pedagogy Workshop: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: Computation for Composition

Computation for Composition

In an era when AI can do all the writing for us, this workshop will consider the way small-scale and self-designed algorithms (as the basics for computation) in addition to other computational mechanisms, can be thoughtful and stimulating parts of a writing process. No computer coding necessary, though some examples might be shown and made available to work with.

Tara Mukund will introduce.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Tara Mukund

Speakers

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Director, MFA in Creative Writing

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an Associate Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Art & Design at Northeastern University. Previously they directed the MFA in Creative Writing at UMASS Boston. They have previously taught at St. Lawrence University, Ithaca College, and Williams College... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 218

9:00am PDT

World-Making and Shaping Change with Octavia E. Butler's Legacy: Moderated by Aimee Bahng

This roundtable-workshop is made up of scholars, artists, writers, and activists who will talk about how Octavia E. Butler’s writings and archive open up possibilities for imagining social justice in our present and future. Butler assembled more than 350 boxes of research material, journals, notebooks, story drafts, fragments, letters, and ephemera that now comprise her Papers at the Huntington Library. She coined the word HistoFuturist to describe herself as a memory worker and “historian who extrapolates from the human past and present as well as the technological past and present.” All of us have incorporated Butler’s writings and archival memory-work into collective projects, and we discuss examples that connect this archive to world-making efforts to shape change in our present and to current debates in ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and queer studies. Topics to be addressed include situating Butler as a black feminist philosopher of science and technology and major climate change intellectual; Butler-focused collective social justice projects; Butler’s visions of memory, resistance, and liberation; the “intentional communities” formed around Butler’s work; and new art, fiction, and activism inspired by Butler’s writings and archive. We will also discuss possibilities and challenges involved in efforts to push questions raised by Butler’s work into different spaces outside the confines of elite institutions such as the Huntington Library.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Aimee Bahng

Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College

Aimee Bahng is author of Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor of the “Transpacific Futurities” special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies (2017). She has published articles on transnational Asian/Amer... Read More →

Speakers

Kiana Murphy

Ayana Jamieson

Shelley Streeby

Friday March 31, 2023 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 217

10:00am PDT

Reading: Ching-In Chen and Trish Salah

Bios: Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry winner) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. A community organizer, they have worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee, Houston and Seattle and are currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They currently teach at University of Washington Bothell in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics. www.chinginchen.com

Born in Halifax / Kjipuktuk in Mi'kma'ki, Trish Salah is a trans dyke poet and critic of Lebanese and Irish descent, and the author of the Lambda Award–winning poetry collection Wanting in Arabic (2002, 2013) and of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (2014, 2017), and co-editor of a special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on transgender cultural production (2014), and Arc Poetry Magazine, featuring trans, non-binary and Two Spirit writers (2021). At the University of Winnipeg she organized the conferences Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (2014 and 2015). An associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she also edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry. She lives in T'karonto in the traditional and unceded territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit River, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.

Kyla Tompkins will introduce and moderate reading with Saru Potturi.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Saru Potturi

Kyla Tompkins

Speakers

Ching-In Chen

University of Washington Bothell

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award... Read More →

Trish Salah

Born in Halifax / Kjipuktuk in Mi'kma'ki, Trish Salah is a trans dyke poet and critic of Lebanese and Irish descent, andthe author of the Lambda Award–winning poetry collection Wanting in Arabic (2002, 2013) and of Lyric Sexology Vol.1 (2014, 2017), and co-editor of a special issues... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

11:00am PDT

Film Screening and Conversation: "Overturning the Solipsism of White Innocence: Notes from the Trenches"

Overturning the Solipsism of White Innocence: Notes from the Trenches
In solidarity with Cathy Park Hong’s declaration in Minor Feelings, we consider the ways our work in film, television, and prose navigates white supremacy and the vexations of audience. How do we find agency in the creation of white characters? In what ways do we manufacture accountability in fictional worlds? And what do we owe our communities versus the mainstream? Works shown include Character (Vera Brunner-Sung, 2020, 16 minutes) and excerpts from The Babysitters Club (Netflix).

Vera Brunner-Sung uses experimental, documentary, and narrative techniques to make films that explore belonging, displacement, and the varied incarnations of American identity. Her work has been presented at festivals, museums, and galleries in the U.S. and abroad, including Sundance, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, MoMA PS1, and Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. She is a 2015 Center for Asian American Media Fellow, 2020 Sundance FilmTwo Fellow, and a 2022 Sundance Institute Asian American Fellow. Vera’s writing on film has appeared in print and online publications including Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope, and Millennium Film Journal. Her chapter on the representation of site-specific art in contemporary documentary appears in Documenting the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2019). She is an associate professor at The Ohio State University.

Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Elle, and Amazon. She has been invited to discuss the book at colleges (Yale, UT Austin) and companies (Google, Amazon), as well as on the air (Late Night with Seth Meyers, NPR’s Morning Edition). Her bestselling novel was optioned by Hulu and has been published in twelve countries. She is also a film and TV writer (The Baby-Sitters Club) and has written and voiced two non-fiction audio projects: The List (Amazon Originals) and You’ve Already Changed Your Life (Audible). Her journalism and essays have appeared in The NYT Magazine, The WSJ, The Best American Food Writing, and others.

Kayling Ong will introduce panel.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Kaylin Ong

Speakers

Jade Chang

Jade Chang’s debut novel,The Wangs vs. the World was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Elle, and Amazon. She has been invited to discuss the book at colleges (Yale, UT Austin) and companies (Google, Amazon), as well as on the air (Late Night with Seth Meyers, NPR’s... Read More →

Vera Brunner-Sung

Associate Professor, The Ohio State University

Vera Brunner-Sung is a filmmaker who works across experimental, documentary, and narrative techniques to explore connections between place and identity.The child of immigrants from Korea and Switzerland, Vera grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After undergraduate work in public policy... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Art Dept. Screening Room (Studio Art Hall 122)

11:00am PDT

Picturing Us: Kin, Kith, Kindred in and as Text-Image Relationships

TITLE
Picturing Us: Kin, Kith, Kindred in and as Text-Image Relationships
DESCRIPTION
In this panel, we celebrate and explore how poets have used text-image relationships to examine the tension between what the media studies scholar Thy Phu has described as the “inscrutable Asian” and the “beneficent model minority.” How have poets resisted the “visual domestication” of the Asian American by engaging the imagistic dramas of intimacy, domesticity, and bureaucracy captured in passport photographs, family portraits, and documents rendered as images?

Can a photograph or visual image embedded in a poetic text offer an opportunity for the racially marked reader of poetry to examine the triangulation between an unmarked (white) viewer/readership, their own subjective frame of reading, and the autobiographical and/or communal positionality proposed by the narrator/speaker? How might this triangulation radiate an emergent kinship or kithship into chromatic communities (of an us of color and an us of migrancy) through acts of reading as looking and vice versa?

Through readings, quick studies, celebratory snapshots, and notes from scholarship, we explore how the story of a nation teeters on the hyphen between text-image. We will contemplate the rhetorical and aesthetic functions of that medial hyphen in our own work and in the formal precedents that have both framed and pierced what Alan Trachtenberg has called the “American album.”

Aarushi Phalke will introduce panel.

Speakers

Aarushi Phalke

Serena Chopra

Assistant Faculty, Seattle University

Serena Chopra (Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Seattle University) is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar... Read More →

Divya Victor

Director, Creative Writing Program. Associate Professor, Michigan State University

Divya Victor is the author of CURB from Nightboat Books. CURB is the winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award (Poetry). She is also the author of KITH (Fence... Read More →

Micheal Leong

Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry, Kenyon College

Amarnath Ravva

Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, California-based writer Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2015) uses prose, documentary footage and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever-evolving story of one person’s apprehension of the ghosts... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

11:00am PDT

Poetry and Prose Reading: Amaud Johnson, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Soham Patel, and Kazim Ali

Nisha Saboo will introduce reading

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Anisha Saboo

Speakers

Soham Patel

Soham Patel is a Kundiman fellow, assistant editor at both Fence and The Georgia Review and the author of recent poetry collections from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, oxeye, The Accomplices, and Subito Press.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Director, MFA in Creative Writing

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Born and raised in Compton, California, Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Red Summer (2006), Darktown Follies (2013), and Imperial Liquor (2020). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, MacDowell Fellow, and Cave Canem Fellow, his... Read More →

Kazim Ali

KAZIM ALI was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

11:00am PDT

Joyce Lu and Truong Tran: "A Seat at the Table: A conversation about race, art, language, wellness/illness and the academy"

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Jordan Chesnut

Author of a forthcoming cross-genre collection, HOW GROSS, MY SEANCES (Plays Inverse, 2022)

Speakers

Truong Tran

Adjunct Professor, Mills College At Northeastern University

Truong Tran is a Vietnamese American writer born in Saigon, Vietnam. He is the author of 6 previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within The Margins, Four Letter Words, 100 Words (Co-authored with Damon Potter). And most... Read More →

Joyce Lu

Associate Professor of Theatre, Pomona College

Friday March 31, 2023 11:00am - 12:50pm PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 218

1:00pm PDT

BREAK

Friday March 31, 2023 1:00pm - 2:00pm PDT

1:00pm PDT

CUPCAKE RECEPTION: INSTALLATION: The Stinky South Asian

Please celebrate in the Crookshank Atrium!

Speakers

Vidhu Aggarwal

Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of Literature, Rollins College

Ahana Ganguly

Friday March 31, 2023 1:00pm - 2:00pm PDT
Crookshank Atrium

2:00pm PDT

Teaching to Transgress: a Tribute to bell hooks - UPDATED TO HYBRID

Teaching to Transgress: a Tribute to bell hooks

This panel gathers writers, scholars, and organizers in memory of bell hooks (1952-2021). We will speak to the far-reaching legacy she has left to those who strive to counteract the “politics of power” in the classroom and on the page. Panelists will address hooks’s critique of contemporary masculinity and racial representation, her expansive theories of “multicultural education,” the sound of Black geology in her dirges and mountain songs, and her wide-ranging, ongoing preoccupation with love in its many forms. This will be an opportunity for panelists and participants alike to discuss not only how we teach, read, and write about hooks’s work, but also how education can be a “practice of freedom” in the twenty-first century.

Nisha Saboo will introduce panel.

ZOOM LINK: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/83718472110

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Abby Munson

Speakers

Tao Leigh Goffe

Tao Leigh Goffe is a Black British interdisciplinary artist, writer, DJ, and professor who grew up between the UK and New York. She specializes in colonial histories of race, debt, and technology. She makes videos, sound sculptures, and installations that foreground digital tools... Read More →

Jess Row

Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine (2014) and two collections of short stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (2011) and The Train to Lo Wu (2005). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Tin House, and many other venues, and he's a frequent contributor... Read More →

Sonya Posmentier

Sonya Posmentier is an associate professor in the Department of English, where she teaches African American and Black Diasporic literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and environmental literature. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

3:00pm PDT

Kaya Reading and Reception: Amarnath Ravva, Truong Tran, Jenny Liou, and Neelanjana Banerjee.

Kaya Press author reading and champagne toast for Thinking Its Presence 2023, bringing together new and veteran Kaya Press authors like Amarnath Ravva (American Canyon), Truong Tran (book of the other: small in comparison), and Jenny Liou (Muscle Memory --forthcoming October 2023, and others if there is space. The reading would be moderated by Kaya Press Managing Editor Neelanjana Banerjee. This opportunity to put Kaya Press authors together would really help us showcase and explore the depth of the Kaya catalogue, dedicated to innovative, experimental and overlooked Asian diasporic literature, which seems especially crucial work at this time. This reading and reception will also honor Sunyoung Lee, as Kaya's long-time publisher and editor and her amazing vision and fortitude in keeping Kaya alive for nearly 30 years.

Speakers

Truong Tran

Adjunct Professor, Mills College At Northeastern University

Jenny Liou

WA, Pierce College

Amarnath Ravva

Neelanjana Banerjee

Managing Editor, Kaya Press

Neelanjana Banerjee is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, an independent publishing house dedicated to innovate Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature. She teaches writing with Writing Workshops Los Angeles and in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA.

Friday March 31, 2023 3:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

6:15pm PDT

Talk & Panel: If Care were the First Learning Objective:

If Care were the First Learning Objective: "A Graduate Seminar on Woundedness"

Imagine a classroom. Imagine a bedside. Imagine a story of woundedness. Imagine all three together and you have the hidden reality of student life: a transhistorical unwellness they all bring to the classroom but must pretend they don't. Every single student comes to classes with deep experiences of bodily betrayal, and every single student endures expectations of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness they cannot fulfill. Every single professor does too. This session imagines teaching and learning with this woundedness, and full humanity, in view. What would it look like to refuse to reproduce the ableist classroom we’ve inherited?

Please join us for the first session of Prof. Lee’s “graduate seminar” on Woundedness. With the help of “TAs” erin Khue Ninh, Mimi Khúc, Aimee Bahng, and Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, and combining arts, scholarly, and pedagogical approaches, we will begin the work of breaking the genre of the classroom. This session is an interactive space to give governance and power to you, the students, asking what you need, and asking what it would mean to rebuild all of our classes this way.

Speakers

erin Khuê Ninh

Associate Professor and Chair, University of California-Santa Barbara

Aimee Bahng

Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College

James Kyung-Jin Lee

Professor of Asian American Studies and English, University of California, Irvine

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis

Curator, Editor, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

Curator (Asian Pacific American Studies), Smithsonian Asian Pacific American CenterEditor, The Asian American Literary Review

Mimi Khúc

Independent scholar; Lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University; Editor at The Asian American Literary Revi

Creator of Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot Author of dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press, March 2024)

Friday March 31, 2023 6:15pm - 7:30pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

7:45pm PDT

Reading: Danzy Senna and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

Leila Mansouri will be introducing Danzy Senna; Jess Row will introduce Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

Speakers

Jess Row

Leila Mansouri

Assistant Professor of English, Scripps College

Leila Mansouri is a fiction writer, essayist, and scholar of American literature. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. She has also written for The Believer, Los... Read More →

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He holds a BA in English creative writing from the University of Montana and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. He was also a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and later a Stegner... Read More →

Danzy Senna

Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California

DANZY SENNA’s internationally bestselling first novel, Caucasia (1998) made her one of today’s most timely and respected literary voices, consistently challenging our culture’s defined states of race, class, and gender norms. Caucasia won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New... Read More →

Friday March 31, 2023 7:45pm - 8:30pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

8:30am PDT

Welcome Table & Registration - SATURDAY - 8:30 A.M. - 1:00 P.M.

Welcome to Pomona College! You will be able to pick up registration badges, totes, and schedules for Thinking Its Presence here. We are thrilled to celebrate the conference with you. The registration table will close at 1:00 p.m.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Mel Gross

Matilda Kirk

Tara Mukund

Sam Pedley

Noah Roskin-Frazee

Emily Schuck

Pomona College

Nasira Bilqis Watts

Saturday April 1, 2023 8:30am - 1:00pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Courtyard

9:00am PDT

Claremont Colleges Alumni Reading Event: Remote and In Person

An Alumni Reading designed to celebrate recently graduated BIPOC artists and writers from the Claremont College Community. Alumni living and working across the world will be reading both remotely and in-person.

Zoom Link: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/89194011835

Speakers

Andie Sheridan

Andie Sheridan is a trans Chinese American poet currently living in Boston. He is a MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he explores a poetic practice interested in creating new forms as a way of creating new queer worlds. Andie’s work has been featured... Read More →

Ariel So

Scripps Alum

Ariel So is originally from Hong Kong and has lived in Singapore and the United States. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Quarter Press, Tupelo Quarterly, Moot Point Magazine, Poetically, Some Kind of Opening, Bee Infinite Publishing, Protest Through Poetry, and elsewhere... Read More →

Xiao Jiang

Xiao recently graduated from Pomona College in 2022 and is currently on the Watson fellowship to explore community, belonging, language, culture, and identity in Chinatowns around the world through documentary filmmaking, photography, and writing. She finds inspiration in the work... Read More →

Adi Gandhi

Adi Gandhi is a poet and essay writer from New Hampshire. He recently graduated from Pomona, and is currently working at NYU Shanghai as a Writing and Speaking Fellow. He likes to write about hybridity, queerness, and simple things. He will probably go to grad school next year.

Ahana Ganguly

Hannah Avalos

Hannah Avalos (she/they) graduated from Pomona College in December 2021. a Chicana, she was born and raised in Southern California. Her work discusses softness, or a Soft Belliedness, to negotiate how histories of colonialism and sexism inform how her body and bodies like hers move... Read More →

Saturday April 1, 2023 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
Crookshank Hall: Ena Thompson Reading Room

9:00am PDT

Film Screening: Brooke Swaney: Daughter of a Lost Bird Screening

DAUGHTER OF A LOST BIRD follows Kendra, an adult Native adoptee raised in a white family, as she reconnects with her birth family, discovers her Lummi heritage, and confronts issues of her own identity. Her singular story echoes many affected by the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Indian Adoption Project, which is currently under threat in US Supreme Court case Brackeen v Haaland.

Protagonist and producer Kendra Mylnechuk Potter will be in attendance for a post screening Q & A.

www.daughterofalostbird.com

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Sophia Chanin

Sebastian Fish Mathurin

Speakers

Kendra Mylnechuk Potter

Kendra Mylnechuk Potter is a theatre artist and filmmaker currently based in Missoula, MT, and enrolled citizen of the Lummi Nation. Her film performances have screened at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and other festivals around the world. She won best actor in NBC/Universal Pictures Short... Read More →

Saturday April 1, 2023 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Art Dept. Screening Room (Studio Art Hall 122)

9:00am PDT

Panel: Ambiguity of Violence

Prageeta Sharma, Ram Natarajan, Valorie Thomas, and Dorothy Wang discuss how their work and life intersect in academia. Creative and critical works read/discussed along with conversation.

Description:
As we as a conference discuss how BIPOC scholars, writers, activists, historians and artists manage hope and its opposite affective feelings, and how institutions produce and perpetuate difficult and violent conditions for the psyche and the body, we focus in this panel on the experiences of BIPOC scholars who deal everyday with the effects of the violence of academic institutions on their careers, their livelihoods, their health and on their colleagues, students, and communities. For all the attention to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the genuine work done by BIPOC students and scholars to transform institutions of higher learning, how to survive in, succeed in, get through, or get out of academia remains a vital but neglected issue. In this panel Prageeta Sharma, Ram Natarajan, Valorie Thomas, and Dorothy Wang think through the presences of the forms of ambiguous violence that are foundational to academia.

Speakers

Dorothy Wang

Professor, Williams College

Ram Natarajan

Valorie Thomas

Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies, Pomona College

Prageeta Sharma

Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English, Pomona College

Saturday April 1, 2023 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 217

9:00am PDT

Pedagogy Workshop: Mimi Khúc: Reading and Writing Tarot for the Apocalypse

Reading and Writing Tarot for the Apocalypse
Join for a tarot session like you've never experienced before! Using the Asian American Tarot, Dr. Mimi Khúc will lead participants in a collective tarot reading and tarot writing workshop to map the contours of our collective unwellness as well as our collective dreaming during the current apocalypse(s). Come help make the tarot card that we all need!

Website: https://www.mimikhuc.com/

Sponsored by Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College.

Saturday April 1, 2023 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Smith Campus Center Classroom 218

11:00am PDT

Los Angeles County Reading: Lynne Thompson, Cherene Sherrard, Raquel Guitterez, and Leila Mansouri

Introduced by Emily Schuck.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Emily Schuck

Pomona College

Speakers

Lynne Thompson

Lynne Thompson is the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small... Read More →

Raquel Gutiérrez

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic/writer, poet and educator. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of theRabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol FoundationArts Writers Grant. Gutiérrez teaches in the Oregon State University-Cascades Low ResidencyCreative... Read More →

Leila Mansouri

Assistant Professor of English, Scripps College

Cherene Sherrard

Professor, Pomona College

Saturday April 1, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

11:00am PDT

Panel: Apprehensions while Strengthening Marginalized Voices Moderated by Gita Saedi Kiely, with Kendra Mylnechuk Potter and Tracy Rector.

We will discuss the responsibilities and implications that exist when empowering storytelling in diasporic and underrepresented communities. Many organizations proclaim the mission of amplifying marginalized voices. But such work will almost always raise concerns of trauma, territory, safety and worth. These concerns will be viewed through our institutional and individual lenses: FilmAid’s work in underrepresented communities; Nia Tero’s work in Indigenous communities and Kendra’s role in Daughter of a Lost Bird and the complications of being both protagonist and producer.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Eva Molina

Speakers

Tracy Rector

Executive Director, Longhouse Media

Tracy Rector is an American filmmaker, curator, and arts advocate based in Seattle, Washington. She is the executive director and co-founder of Longhouse Media, an Indigenous and POC media arts organization and home of the nationally acclaimed program Native Lens.

Kendra Mylnechuk Potter

Gita Saedi Kiely

Director, FilmAid

I have spent many years producing and editing social justice documentary films, always with an eye toward spotlighting marginalized communities. Currently I am the Director of FilmAid, a global film organization that supports local, independent filmmaking in underrepresented communities... Read More →

Saturday April 1, 2023 11:00am - 12:30pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

1:00pm PDT

BREAK

Saturday April 1, 2023 1:00pm - 2:00pm PDT

2:00pm PDT

Reading: Matthew Salesses & Ruth-Ellen Kocher (LAST MINUTE ZOOM LINK CHANGE!)

Introduced by Teresa Carmody with a short Q & A

*Ruth-Ellen Kocher will be presenting remotely

ZOOM LINK: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/83378675442

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Teresa Carmody

Teresa Carmody’s writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. She is the author of three books, including Maison Femme: a fiction (2015) and The Reconception of Marie (2020). Her work has appeared in The Collagist, Los Angeles Review... Read More →

Speakers

Ruth Ellen Kocher

University of Colorado-Boulder

Ruth Ellen Kocher was born and raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She received a BA from Pennsylvania State University and an MFA and a PhD from Arizona State University.Kocher is the author of several poetry collections, including Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016); domina Un/blued (Tupelo... Read More →

Matthew Salesses

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Columbia University

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of the bestsellers The Hundred-Year Flood, an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015 and Amazon.com Best Book of September, and Craft in the Real World, a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribu... Read More →

Saturday April 1, 2023 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

3:00pm PDT

A Conversation with Ishmael Reed

A conversation between Dorothy Wang and Ishmael Reed. Introduced by J. Finley.

ZOOM link: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/87398076366

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

J Finley

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Pomona College

Speakers

Dorothy Wang

Professor, Williams College

Ishmael Reed

Saturday April 1, 2023 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

4:15pm PDT

Reception: Champagne Toast to Carmen Gimenez, Will Alexander, John Keene, and Myriam J.A. Chancy

We will be honoring and toasting Carmen Gimenez, Will Alexander, John Keene, and Myriam J.A. Chancy's recent awards of Graywolf Editor/Publisher-at-Large, Pulitzer Finalist, and American Book Award winner, respectively. So proud of them! We'll toast them and have them read from their work.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Lynne Thompson

Speakers

John Keene

Distinguished Professor and Chair, Africana Studies, English, MFA in Creative Writing, Rutgers University

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems, which received a 2022 National Book Award, a 2022 Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle, a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and... Read More →

Will Alexander

Poet, Individual

Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud... Read More →

Carmen Giménez

Executive Director, Graywolf Press

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for... Read More →

Myriam J. A. Chancy

Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of the Humanities, Scripps College

Myriam J. A. Chancy (1970-), Guggenheim Fellow & HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College, is a Haitian-Canadian/American writer born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake, What Storm, What Thunder appeared in fall 2021 with Harper Collins Canada... Read More →

Saturday April 1, 2023 4:15pm - 5:30pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

5:45pm PDT

Celebration Reading: Carmen Gimenez, Will Alexander, John Keene, and Myriam J.A. Chancy

Reading following champagne toast to celebrate Will Alexander, Myriam J.A. Chancy, Carmen Giménez, and John Keene's recent literary achievements.

Cherene Sherrard will introduce event.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Cherene Sherrard

Professor, Pomona College

Speakers

John Keene

Distinguished Professor and Chair, Africana Studies, English, MFA in Creative Writing, Rutgers University

Will Alexander

Poet, Individual

Carmen Giménez

Executive Director, Graywolf Press

Myriam J. A. Chancy

Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of the Humanities, Scripps College

Saturday April 1, 2023 5:45pm - 6:45pm PDT
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

7:00pm PDT

Percival Everett reading followed by a conversation with Carmen Gimenez & Percival Everett, moderated by Jonathan Lethem

Conversation moderated by Pomona Professor Jonathan Lethem.

Speakers

Jonathan Lethem

Roy Edward Disney '51 Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English, Pomona College

Celebrated for his novels, short stories and essays, Jonathan Lethem is recognized today as one of America’s foremost contemporary writers. His works include twelve novels, five short-story collections, six non-fiction books and an array of essays published in such publications... Read More →

Saturday April 1, 2023 7:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

8:45am PDT

Morning meet: Coffee and pastries

Come have some coffee, tea, pastries in Crookshank Hall.

Sunday April 2, 2023 8:45am - 10:00am PDT
Crookshank Hall: Ena Thompson Reading Room

9:00am PDT

Morning Film Screening: Saif Alsaegh: There are Landscapes for War and Landscapes for Peace.

Event Description: Screening of short films that navigate the landscape of war and immigration. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, these works create a calm and cruel sense of survival: 1991, Bezuna, and Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness. There will be a Q&A following the films.

Synopses:

Through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone, the calm landscape of the cabin, and the chaotic landscape of memory, 1991 paints a cruel image of the horror of war and separation.

Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness contrasts the fragmented past of the filmmaker growing up in Baghdad with his surreal California present. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, the film creates a calm and cruel sense of memory and landscape.

Bezuna explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.

Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in many festivals including Cinema du Reel, Kruzfilm Festival Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Onion City Film Festival and in galleries and museums including the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. He received his MFA in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Noura Jabir

Speakers

Saif Alsaegh

Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His... Read More →

Sunday April 2, 2023 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
Art Dept. Screening Room (Studio Art Hall 122)

10:00am PDT

South Asian Futures: South Asian Poetics & Aesthetics Discussion

Roundtable inviting our community to think with us about experimental practices and movements in creative writing, theory, performances studies, and art-making. We will be posing questions and inviting students and colleagues to discuss what a Desi futures in aesthetic practices look like. (This panel may include additional speakers--it's in process.)

Loose thoughts to consider:

Thoughts from Prageeta Sharma in forming the discussion:
"I'd like to talk about the intersection between poetics and aesthetics and our avant-garde and translation practices and particular needs among ourselves that get lost when we accommodate too many things... Eventually, I'd like to build this into a funded Pomona retreat for us to think about theory, art-making, philosophy, and writing; particularly, what solidarity and mentoring practices we create as a community inside and outside of the poetry/art-making industrial complex and outside of the consumptive and toxic cultural spaces we seek to interrogate--for example, for me, I'm thinking about caste-privilege and Hindutva ideology, in particular, but how a modeling of this can strangely move in and out of our art, academic, and writing worlds; and I am questioning Hinduism's role in my life altogether and what Marxism means to me today. You might have a different set of ideological frameworks to unpack. I'd love to hear them—particularly work that generates conversations outside of our sense of "career-building." I hope these generative themes might speak to you? I guess they have been speaking to me."

Thoughts from our speakers for discussion, from Vivek Narayanan:
"What it might mean to build artistic collectives where there’s an acknowledgment... that we may all be coming from different places, that we can’t assume that our subjectivities or even our political positions are exactly the same, that a South Asian artists/ poets collectivity would insist on the long traditions of plurality, multiplicity, border crossing and hybridity openness to the “foreign “ that has been the hallmark of South Asian life for millennia . Such a collective would find a way to celebrate its diversity and also move towards what it might mean to contribute artistically to political activism and advocacy whether in response to authoritarianism and close-mindedness on the subcontinent or indeed the rise of conservatism among south Asian Americans."

*Coffee, tea, and pastries will be available in Crookshank from 8:45 am till gone.

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Eshanya Agrawal

Speakers

Soham Patel

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Kazim Ali

Vidhu Aggarwal

Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of Literature, Rollins College

Vivek Narayanan

Assistant Professor, George Mason University

Anuradha Vikram

Writer, critic, and cultural organizer, UCLA

Prageeta Sharma

Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English, Pomona College

Sunday April 2, 2023 10:00am - 11:00am PDT
Crookshank Hall: Ena Thompson Reading Room

11:00am PDT

Carribean Fragoza, Vicky Vértiz, Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, Janine Joseph, and Jimmy Vega

Reading of prose and poetry

Registration, Moderator, Intro...

Devlin Orlin

Speakers

Janine Joseph

Associate Professor/Dean's Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Virginia Tech

Janine Joseph is a poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems (Alice James Books, 2023) and Driving Without a License (2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in The Nation... Read More →

Vickie Vértiz

Lecturer, UC Santa Barbara

Vickie Vértiz is the oldest child of an immigrant Mexican family. Her poetry and essays are featured in the New York Times magazine, Huizache, the Los Angeles Review of Books, KCET Departures, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among many publications. Her second book Auto/Body won... Read More →

Jimmy Vega

Poet x Assistant Director, Beyond Baroque

jimmy vega is the child of Mexican immigrants, a Chicanx Los Angeles born and raised poet, writer, educator, artist, and curator. He holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from UCLA and an MFA from the School of Critical Studies, Creative Writing Program... Read More →

Carribean Fragoza

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Hello!! I am a queer, sick/disabled, brown/Colombian poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker, and am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Departments of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Politics at Scripps College. My scholarship focuses on histories of... Read More →

Sunday April 2, 2023 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT
Crookshank Hall: Ena Thompson Reading Room

12:00pm PDT

Tribute to William Yellow Robe - UPDATED TO HYBRID!

In Memoriam: William S. Yellow Robe Jr.
This panel honors the memory and legacy of the acclaimed Assiniboine playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Bill), who passed away on July 19, 2021. Bill S. Yellow Robe’s works illuminated with stringent accuracy and compelling emotional impact the intricate web of vulnerability and despair, resourcefulness and resilience, that constitutes the experiences of Native American people. As a writer of Black and Native ancestry, he brought to his art a keen understanding of the racial vertigo of doubly racialized and doubly marginalized subjects. His poems and plays were notable for a social realism punctuated with irony, attuned to the absurdities of “cruel optimism,” but they were also infused with mythopoetic dreaming and utopian longing. His legacy continues to reverberate nationally and internationally in the theater as well as in the hearts of those who had the opportunity to enjoy his friendship and transformative mentorship.

ZOOM streaming link: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/82505054164

*Light refreshments available outside of Rose Hill theatre at 11:45

Speakers

Prageeta Sharma

Henry G. Lee '37 Professor of English, Pomona College

Kendra Mylnechuk Potter

Katie Kane

Associate Professor, University of Montana

Margo Lukens

Professor of English, University of Maine

Wabanaki literature and storytelling, intertribal drama, decolonization, teaching white people about privilege, acting, directing, community theater.“Still They Remember Me”: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Vol. 1 with Carol Dana and Conor Quinn https://www.umasspress.com/978162... Read More →

Sunday April 2, 2023 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre

1:15pm PDT

Dark & Sweet Endings: Closing Ceremony with Hannah Eko

Dark & Sweet Endings

Digestion is a sweet act. Join Hannah Eko, author of Honey is the Knife as she leads a closing circle designed to help attendees integrate Thinking Its Presence into their everyday lives. Inspired by the radical sweetness of the West African feminine deity Osun, Hannah Eko will facilitate an experience that centers pleasure as justice. Expect dreamy black feminist vibes, nervous system tending, and the raw, sticky, dark, sweet power of honey.

Speakers

Hannah Eko

HANNAH OLABOSIBE SHOKOYA EKO is a Nigerian-American first daughter who never became a lawyer, doctor, or engineer. She did however attend five years of military school and graduate from the US Merchant Marine Academy, during which she completed a thesis on Black ethnomusicology (“I... Read More →

Sunday April 2, 2023 1:15pm - 2:15pm PDT
Smith Campus Center: Rose Hill Theatre