Event 2 in Black Is...Black Ain't  | Black Study 2.0

It's a new year and a new Black Study. Welcome to "Culture Complex," the second event in our Black Study 2.0 series: Black Is...Black Ain't.

The event will feature writer Lauren Michele Jackson, filmmaker and photographer Tayarisha Poe, and poet-journalist Jacqui Germain as participant moderator in a conversation about and related to culture and culture/cultural making. Curated by Steffan Triplett.

Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of White Negroes (Beacon Press) and the forthcoming Back: An American Tale (Amistad Press).

Tayarisha Poe is a filmmaker and photographer from West Philly, and the writer and director of Selah and the Spades.. Tayarisha is a storyteller who believes that all stories are inherently multi-sensory and multi-dimensional, and thus should be told that way.

Jacqui Germain is a poet, journalist, and former community organizer living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. She has received fellowships from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Poetry Foundation's Emerging Poets Incubator. Her creative writing often involves an excavation of history and memory, attempting to challenge linear assumptions of time, progress, power, and experience through an intimate lens. Germain believes everyone has blind spots and is constantly striving to sharpen her analysis of the world around her. She's presently the 2021 ESP Fellow with Teen Vogue and is currently working on her first full-length poetry collection.

The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics’ (CAAPP) Black Study 2.0 series, “Black is…Black Ain’t” features poet and translator Rosa Alcalá,  transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´, poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet Natalie Diaz, poet Terrance Hayes, poet Ladan Osman, poet-journalist Jacqui Germain, culture writer/scholar Lauren Michele Jackson, filmmaker Tayarisha Poe, writer and performance artist lê thị diễm thúy, poet and visual artist Aldrin Valdez, poet Divya Victor, and poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña. The series is organized around various themes while all exploring ideas of Blackness’s fugitivity, its runaway state, how it can attach to other bodies who must then take up a disparaged subjectivity, and, too, creativity.

In this Black Study series, CAAPP’s programming will be intentionally African diasporic and in conversation with the range of Indigenous and displaced peoples of color. In this Study, we focus our collective curatorial lens on creating, rethinking, working together to shift inherited categories and ideas of race/Black/etc. We might think of the virtual events as connected to the following thought experiment: what if together in community we try to upend the blatant, subtle, and invisible modes of domination using our creative practice?

We hope you'll join us for the entire series!

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

"Culture Complex" ft. Lauren Michele Jackson, Tayarisha Poe, & Jacqui Germain