What counter-geographies and subterranean archives does the poet assemble? In their recent works — Village and Bard, Kinetic, both out with Coffee House Press – LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Anne Waldman trace related constructions of place and memory, the imperiled and essential wavelengths at the edge that propel and hold our communities across time. Voices full of voices travel ecstatic distance in these poems and records of friends and generations.
Featuring a guest introduction by Jennifer Firestone
We hope you can join us at 7:00PM for a reception before the event. The reading will begin at 8:00PM. Masks will be optional while enjoying drinks and company during the reception but will be required once the reading begins.
A writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013) and Village (Coffee House Press 2023). Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals including: Explore the North Festival, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; Hekayeh Festival, Abu Dhabi; International Poetry Festival of Copenhagen; Ocean Space, Venice; International Poetry Festival of Romania; Question of Will, Slovakia; Poesiefestival, Berlin; and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award (2016) and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She lives in Harlem and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College and Stetson University.
Poet, curator, professor, performer, and cultural activist Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. She is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism, among five others. Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery and has been described by Patti Smith as “exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.” Waldman was the keynote speaker for the Bob Dylan and the Beats Conference in Tulsa in the Spring of 2022, and she wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera/movie Black Lodge with music by composer David T. Little that premiered at Opera Philadelphia in October of 2022. Publishers Weekly has called Anne Waldman a “counter-cultural giant.” Waldman is most recently the author of Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat, 2022). http://www.annewaldman.org/
Masks are required at all Poetry Project events unless otherwise specifically noted. If you forget to bring your mask, we are happy to provide you with one. We also encourage all event attendees to take a rapid test the day of the event before heading to the church.
This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project's YouTube. Livestream captions will be available via a StreamText link or the CC button on YouTube's player.
Open CART captioning is scheduled for most in-person events.