M. NourbeSe Philip: XAqua

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 4:30pm
Zoom

FREE! RSVP required for access to virtual event.

As the fourth talk of Into the Deluge—an exhibition and series of lectures exploring bodies of water as archives of memory, sites of history, and forms of knowledge—unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and independent scholar M. NourbeSe Philip will talk about her work.

Born in Tobago, M. NourbeSe Philip lives in the space-time of the city of Toronto where she practiced law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter; the play Coups and Calypsos; and four collections of essays including her most recent collection BlanK. Her book-length poem Zong! is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council), the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding Mid-Career Artist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (U.S.A.), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (U.S.A.), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award, and Dora Award finalist (Drama). She has received Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio) fellowships. She is an awardee of both the Y.W.C.A. Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers’ retreats. M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

Into the Deluge is organized by John Hulsey, Andrew W. Mellon Postgraduate Research Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts Practices at Wesleyan University. It is sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life with co-sponsorship from the Office of Academic Affairs, the Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitor’s Fund of the Department of Art and Art History, Writing at Wesleyan, Caribbean Studies, College of Film and the Moving Image, Department of African American Studies, Center for African American Studies, Department of American Studies, and Wesleyan University Press.