An Evening of Poetry: Tayi Tibble & Harryette Mullen

Beyond Baroque is honored to present New Zeleand poet, Tayi Tibble, & L.A. author, Harryette Mullen for an evening of poetry! Tayi Tibble’s second collection, Rangikura is a coming-of-age and elegy to the traumas born from colonization that asks readers to think about our relationship to desire and exploitation. Moving between hotel lobbies and all-night clubs, these poems chronicle life spent in spaces that are stalked by transaction and reward. Written with Māori moteatea, purakau, and karakia (chants, legends, and prayers) in mind, her work explores the way the past comes back, even when she tries to turn her back on it. “I was forced to remember that,/wherever I go,/even if I go nowhere at all,/I am still a descendent of mountains.”

Harryette’s latest chapbook Open Leaves / poems from earth (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press) unwraps in lush haiku and poetic prose savoring the abundance of a flourishing landscape, with concern for the fragility of the land on which life depends. Harryette’s verdant and troubling poetry is paired with Tiffanie Delune's sensuous, pulsating artwork.

Book signing & reception with light refreshments will follow after the readings.

Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Te Whanganui a Tara, Aotearoa. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. She is the author of Poūkahangatus and Rangikura.

Harryette Mullen’s latest books are Open Leaves/poems from earth (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2023) and a critical edition of her poetry, Her Silver-Tongued Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). A new collection, Regaining Unconsciousness, is scheduled for release in 2025 from Graywolf Press. Others include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (University of Alabama, 2012) won an Elizabeth Agee Award. In 2013, Graywolf published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA.