Pamela Sneed (Funeral Diva) and Arisa White (Who’s Your Daddy) discuss life writing and autobiography in recent books. Moderated by mace dent johnson. In partnership with New York University’s Creative Writing Program.
This virtual event will be broadcasted via Zoom. Please register here.
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. She has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is online faculty in SAIC’s low-residency MFA program, teaching Human Rights and Writing Art, and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC for 5 consecutive years. In 2020, she was the program’s commencement Speaker. She also teaches new genres in Columbia Universities’ School of the Arts. Sneed has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum, MOMA, Broad Museum, and the Toronto Biennale. Her visual poetry work is currently on view at Whitman Walker. She delivered the closing keynote for Artist, Designers, Citizens Conference/a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems. In 2018, she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in poetry. Sneed is widely published in journals such as The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her latest poetry and prose book, Funeral Diva (City Lights, 2020), was featured in The New York Times and Publishers Weekly.
Arisa White is an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College and a Cave Canem fellow. She serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. She is the co-editor of the anthology Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of the middle-grade biography Biddy Mason Speaks Up, winner of the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature. Published by Augury Books in 2021, Who’s Your Daddy is Arisa’s recently released poetic memoir, which Patricia Smith says “unreels like heart-wrenching fragments of film.” She can be reached at: arisawhite.com.
mace dent johnson is a writer and artist from Columbus, Georgia. They are currently a Creative Writing MFA candidate in the Poetry program at Washington University in St. Louis. They are a Cave Canem and Watering Hole fellow.