Reading: Harmony Holiday and Ariana Reines
About the event
To celebrate the publication of Harmony Holiday's new book of poems Maafa, join us for a poetry reading with Holiday and poet Ariana Reines.
Register to attend here.
Vaccination and masks are required.
Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed her father and been granted eternal life. Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero's journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.
About the readers
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, and the author of five collections of poetry. She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She has received the Motherwell Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She lives in Los Angeles.
Ariana Reines is the author of A Sand Book, winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, and from Fence, Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize in 2006. Her Obie-winning play Telephone was translated into Norwegian and French, and published by WONDER. New projects by Ariana include DIVINE JUSTICE, a 24-hour performance based on Medea at Performance Space New York on June 12, 2022 and Invisible College, an ongoing internet experiment in poetry and arts education that began with the Covid-19 pandemic. She is the 2022 Mary Routt Chair in Literature at Scripps College.