After attending three days of CAAPP Black Study Intensive programming, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, the “official correspondent” for the week, will lead participants in a masterclass developed in conversation with the work and words of Dionne Brand, Aracelis Girmay, Emily Greenwood, Saidiya Hartman, Erica Hunt, Zun Lee, and Harryette Mullen. The masterclass will keep our themes of Collective Protest and Rebellion and black study in mind especially as they relate to the current moment. Join us for a hands-on writing experience with one of American poetry’s finest writers.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Associate Professor at Cornell University, is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third poetry collection, and Purchase, a collection of essays. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective. She was one of ten celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works for MoMA.

The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics’ (CAAPP) week-long Black Study Intensive, “Collective Protest & Rebellion,” features poet/essayist/novelist Dionne Brand, filmmaker Charles Burnett, filmmaker Julie Dash, poet/performer/composer JJJJJerome Ellis, poet Aracelis Girmay, scholar Emily Greenwood, writer/cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, poet/scholar Erica Hunt, interdisciplinary theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones­, photographer Zun Lee, poet/scholar Harryette Mullen, and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon as a way to think in creativity toward collective agency and social change. With urgency, we look toward the 2020/2021 academic year as an opportunity to, in Fred Moten’s sense of the word, “study” together, what he sometimes calls talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. This week we come together to engage in black study in community during this time of upheaval and repair. It is here where we seek innovative discovery in the act of creating as productive of new knowledges that help change the world. We hope you’ll join us for the entire week!

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation.

“Thinking in Creative Practice: A Masterclass with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon”