Our first session of camp has been so rewarding—from writing to pen pals to creating new worlds on the page, we couldn’t have asked for a better start. We're also very grateful for the opportunity to work with many talented visiting artists: Last week, Elia Khalaf visited our students and introduced them to the magic of correspondence art; this week, we'll be joined by acclaimed poet Roger Reeves, author of King Me, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. Reeves has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Whiting Award, Hodder Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and Cave Canem Fellowships. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and more, and his second collection of poetry, On Paradise, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
Originally from southern New Jersey, Reeves earned a B.A. in English from Morehouse College. From there, he went on to earn his M.A. in English from Texas A&M University, an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing, and a Ph.D from the University of Texas Austin. Currently, he works as an Associate Professor of Poetry at UT Austin. He'll be leading our students through a poetry workshop entitled "Uncertain / Times" which you can find a description of below:
We are living in a moment when the news tells us that we are heading to certain catastrophe. The country seems undone. We are detaining children in camps. School is no longer a place of safety, refuge. How do we write in the midst of that uncertainty? What can we, young people, offer creatively that will allow us to not only breathe but possibly speak back to the impossibility, speak back to the void and chaos? Through looking at several poetry modes like documentary poetics, poetry of witness, and procedural poetry, we will write our resistance, we will write our lives, we will write our future. We will look at poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Solmaz Sharif, and M. NourbeSe Philips as a way into our poems, looking for what can be stolen from in their poems and used in the ones we will create in this workshop.
Stay tuned to hear more about Reeves' visit with our PageSlayers!