Trans and Genderqueer Poetry Symposium

Dawn Lundy Martin

Biography

Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Poetry Prize and after publication a finalist for both the 2012 Lambda Literary Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize; A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; CANDY, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books, 2012); and, The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship. Among her many honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grants for Poetry in 2002 and 2006 and the 2008 Academy of American Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets; co-editor of a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: Young Activists And The New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004); and a founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, a national feminist organization that supports the social justice work of young women and trans youth. She is an assistant professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her in-progress collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life is forthcoming in 2014.

Workshop Description

THE VALUE OF FORGETTING: BLACKNESS, GENDER, THE TEXTUAL BODY, & THE ARCHITECTURE OF PAST. I'm thinking, I suppose, of the ways in which the raced/gendered body in this configuration need to resist certain kinds of scripting or inscribing. Also, thinking about the repercussions of unproblematic investments in remembering. What other spaces might be opened up for the writing body if we intensionally neglected active remembering?