Rituals For Grief & Love: A Reading with poets Sade LaNay And Sasha Banks
01.28.2021| 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar
Join us in celebrating two new poetry collections, I love you and I’m not dead by Sade LaNayand america, MINE by Sasha Banks. Released at the beginning of COVID-19, both poets’ work cannot be any more timely. LaNay and Banks’ collections each take the approach of archival resurrection to name and imagine Black life outside conditions of social death. In I love you and I’m not dead, LaNay’s investment is not only their spiritual and physical healing, but the healing of Black women across time and space whose claims to freedom were loud and somewhere across the archival narrative, misread as quiet. As LaNay declares, “Disbelief does not undo the validity of an experience.” In a similar poetic sensibility, america, MINE demands that readers confront America’s history of racial and gender violence because “endings exist” and the end of the nation is coming. In leaning on rituals of radical conjuring, LaNay and Banks draft roadmaps of fugitive escapes that make Black life in the future possible.
Co-sponsored by the Multicultural Community Center, Center for Research on Social Change, UC Berkeley Womxn of Color Initiative, UC Berkeley Graduate Women’s Project, and the UC Berkeley Sexual Orientation and Gender Advocacy Project.
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