Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting and Rhetoric PhD student at UC Berkeley, invites poets Claudia Rankine and Pamela Sneed for a conversation on commemoration.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, poet, playwright and MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine writes: “This would be your fatal flaw–your memory, vessel of feelings …” The accumulation of everyday violence and racism forms heavy memories that make it difficult to imagine a present and future different from the past.

In Funeral Diva, poet and visual artist Pamela Sneed laments surviving the AIDS crisis in NYC as a Black lesbian. While grieving the friends she lost, Sneed also mourns the erasure of Black lesbians and their labor and asks: “Who takes care of the caretakers?”

How to care for erased stories, while simultaneously creating different ways of storytelling: stories that do not rely on legibility, relatability, certainty and factual proof?

This event is initiated by Simon(e) van Saarloos and sponsored by the Rhetoric Department, Stone Chair Funds, Black Studies Collaboratory, Townsend Center, Arts & Research Center, The Department of English, the Holloway Poetry Series, and the Othering & Belonging Institute.

Admission is free and open to the public.

More information on the event can be found here.