domestic violence
Niki Herd reads at a symposium hosted by Feminist Formations, an interdisciplinary journal of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Herd's performance includes a poem from The Language of Shedding Skin (2010) and an excerpt from a work in progress. This reading was originally given with Natalie Diaz.
Leonard Michaels reads from short stories written throughout his career, and concludes the reading with an excerpt from his novel The Men's Club (1981). His uncompromising realist sketches catch characters at their darkest and most vulnerable moments, and are colored with absurdist humor. Stories include those published in his collections Going Places (1969) and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975).
Nikky Finney reads poems from her collections The World Is Round (2003) and Lovechild's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (forthcoming in 2020). Finney also reads her new work titled "Black Boy with Cow: A Still Life" commissioned for the Poetry Center's Art for Justice series. Members of the American Friends Service Committee, Tucson give an introductory presentation.
Reading in Tucson for the second time in 1972, Ai reads from her manuscript then titled Wheel in a Ditch, which would be published the following year as Cruelty (1973), her first book. She also reads several poems that would appear in her second book, Killing Floor (1979), as well as several that remain uncollected.