Presented in our Keith Haring exhibition, next to Haring's enormous artwork, The Matrix 1983, enjoy an evening of poetry with Isabel Waidner, Jay G. Ying, Laurel Uziell, Nat Raha, and Niven Govinden and organised by Patrick Staff and Dagmawi Woubshet.
Through a range of readings of poetry, prose, and critical text, the evening will broadly explore Woubshet's concept of a 'poetics of compounding loss,' a vital condition of queer and trans expression wherein speech acts become a necessary vehicle of survival, and love and open grief may operate at the very center of art and protest.
The event is organised as part of Patrick Staff's residency, and supported by the Keith Haring Foundation.
Biographies
Patrick Staff
Patrick Staff is an artist based in Los Angeles, USA and London, UK. Their work has been presented internationally, including solo shows at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2016); and Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015). Recent group exhibitions have included The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Made in LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger, New Museum, New York (2015).
Dagmawi Woubshet
Dagmawi Woubshet is the Ahuja Family Presidential Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ and African studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (2015), and the co-edited volume Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo (2010). His writings have appeared in various publications including Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic.
Jay G Ying
Jay G Ying is a poet, fiction writer, critic and translator based in Edinburgh. His debut pamphlet Wedding Beasts was published by Bitter Melon in 2019 and is shortlisted for the Saltire-Calum MacDonald Award. His second pamphlet Katabasis will be published in 2020 by The Poetry Business. He is a contributing editor at The White Review.
Isabel Waidner
Isabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist. Their books include We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019), Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. They are the co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (with Richard Porter), and an academic at University of Roehampton, London. We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff is shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2019.
Niven Govinden
Niven Govinden is the author of five novels, including Black Bread White Beer, which won the Fiction Uncovered Prize, and All the Days and Nights, which was longlisted for the Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. His latest book This Brutal House (Dialogue Books) was shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize.
Nat Raha
Nat Raha is a poet, musican and trans/queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her poetry includes Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), Countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and Octet (Veer Books, 2010). Nat is a postdoctoral researcher on the 'Cruising the 70s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures' project at the Edinburgh College of Art, and co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine.