Thinking Lucille Clifton Thinking

Please join us for the first event of the Trans/Queer Studies Colloquium this semester on Thursday, February 22 at 6:30pm in South College E470. All are welcome! Zoom option available, register here.

Talk Description:
How do we think gendered being at the beginning and ending of the world? Across Lucille Clifton’s work is both an engagement of this question and, as such, object lessons for black/feminist criticism. Or, to say it another way, Clifton thinking is a study in thinking.

Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022). Currently, he is thinking about literary criticism as a form of estrangement and consolation or, said another way, he is thinking about the workings and potency of black sentences.