police brutality

Camille Rankine reads poems from Incorrect Merciful Impulses (2016), as well as uncollected poems. This reading was originally given with Ocean Vuong.

Poet Douglas Kearney and percussionist/electronic musican Val Jeanty present a collaborative performance titled "Fodder," which combines poetry and music at the 2017 Thinking Its Presence Conference. The poems primarily come from Kearney's Buck Studies (2016).

As part of the Institute for Inquiry and Poetics and the Art for Justice series, Nicole Sealey, John Murillo, and Hanif Abdurraqib read from and discuss their writing centered on police violence, the carceral justice system, and racial injustice towards Black Americans. Sealey specifically reads excerpts from her then-unpublished manuscript The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (2023). Diana Marie Delgado leads a conversation throughout the event.

Roger Reeves reads poems from his second book, Best Barbarian (2022), together with a prose excerpt from Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (2023) and new poems. Reeves' work in this reading highlights the violence inherent in the United States—both as an idea and as a reality. His poems and prose frequently include allusions to canonical and contemporary literature, American history and politics, and hip hop.