Join us for the livestream of our feature Black Study event for spring 2025 featuring Jason B. Williams, Canisia Lubrin, & Jason Allen-Paisant.

Our main event of CAAPP's Spring 2025 Black Study: Ecological Desire. Our three guests will read work and share in creative conversation.

About the theme: 
Toni Cade Bambara said, “To be trapped in other people’s fiction puts us under arrest.” Ecological Desire: Thinking Outside Enclosure is about archiving and studying Black speculative practice outside and in spite of western enclosure—someone else’s fiction. In this installment of Black Study, our guests will be in creative conversation about how we might transgress the limits of reality, time, nation, and the single self as practitioners of an embodied poetics, and how we have and might continue to organize ourselves into new ecological relation.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the debut novel Ours, and the collections Mutiny, winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Randolph College’s low-res MFA.

Canisia Lubrin is an acclaimed poet, editor and writer. Her writings explore ideas of social justice and the limits and possibilities of art, form, and language. Her books include the story collection, Code Noir (Knopf, 2023). Her first book Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017) was named a CBC Best Book. Her second book, The Dyzgraphxst (M & S, 2020) won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the overall Literature prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Derek Walcott Prize. That same year, she was awarded the Canada Council’s Joseph S. Stauffer prize for literary achievement and the Windham-Campbell prize for a body of work. Among other honours, her writing was finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Anthologies that include her fiction were finalists for the Toronto Book Award and the Shirly Jackson Award. She was twice longlisted for the Journey Prize.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a scholar, award-winning poet, and writer. His work explores how Afro-diasporic artists and communities shape their futures through embodied philosophies, focusing on the intersections of poetry and philosophy. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry. His debut poetry collection Thinking with Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize, and was an Irish Times and White Review book of the year. Self-Portrait as Othello, his sophomore book of poems, won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 — the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize; it is one of the rare books to have accomplished this feat. His other books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire and The Natural World, a collaboration with photographers David Hartt and John Edmonds and curator Nathaniel Stein. He has edited various publications and his work is widely anthologised. His latest publication, The Possibility of Tenderness, a work of literary nonfiction, will be published in March 2025. Jason holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. His recent art collaborators include British painter Chris Ofili, the Manchester Art Gallery and the Cincinnati Art Gallery.

CAAPP Black Study: Ecological Desire ft. PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS, CANISIA LUBRIN, & JASON ALLEN-PAISANT