Oh, yes.
We are in for a special one tonight, friends.
Tonight we welcome two poets who are doing that real work, that
work most needed right now in this world, in this nation,
and on this campus.
In the early 1960s in an essay entitled,
"The creative process," James Baldwin wrote, quote,
"If we understood ourselves better,
we would damage ourselves less."
He argued that nations, like individuals,
must not look away continuing, quote,
"That whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his
past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison
of his undiscovered self," end quote.
And don't we seem immobilized today?
Don't we see the mass incarceration
of the undiscovered self?
Don't we see ourselves saying, "Really?
In 2019, really?"
just a few too many times.
Well, here, two poets writing against that very particular
United Statesian tendency to look away, to forget,
to gloss that weaponized amnesia that
is part and parcel of white supremist systems everywhere.
Here tonight we are with two poets who write themselves
free, who write us all into motion as they
write across pages and stages writing the truth--
that unique all-encompassing, all-mobilizing word truth,
writing motion needed by a movement,
writing across two generations they represent
and all the generations represented
in them, past and future.
So Patricia Smith, born and raised
on the West side of Chicago.
She has worked as a journalist, a playwright,
a librettist for opera, a children's book author.
She writes history.
She is a master of the poetic form.
And yes for years, she won National Poetry Slams like
they're going out of style.
[LAUGHTER]
Author of 10 books, including her
most recent, Incendiary Art.
Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts poetry award,
and the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP
Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.
She is a Cave Canem faculty member,
a professor of English at CUNY College of Staten Island
and a faculty member of the Sierra Nevada MFA program.
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion.
She earned her BA at Hunter College and as an MFA candidate
in poetry at Warren Wilson Her Her work has appeared
in the BreakBeat Poets anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry
Magazine, BuzzFeed reader, and elsewhere.
Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay
Colony residency, Urban Word NYC mentor,
and the founder and curator of the Green Light Bookstore
Poetry Salon.
In 2011 she represented NYC at both the Women
of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam.
Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally.
She lives in Brooklyn.
In 2016, Nafis was the recipient of the Ruth Lilly
and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship
from the Poetry Foundation.
[CROWD CHEERING]
And in 2017, she was awarded a creative writing fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
We are in for a special one tonight, friends.
[CROWD CHEERING]
Please join me in welcoming none other than Patricia Smith
and Angel Nafis.
[CROWD CHEERING LOUDLY]