Join us for a poetry reading featuring New York City-based, award-winning poet Candace Williams and participants from their UConn-Stamford workshop Poet Against Empire: A Generative Erasure Workshop. This free, public event is at Franklin Street Works on November 14 from 6 – 8pm. The workshops and the reading are co-sponsored by UConn-Stamford’s English Department and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

During two, midday Poet Against Empire workshops, Williams will teach students how erasure poetry allows writers and visual artists to generate work by manipulating texts that already exist. Workshop participants will be prompted to pay particular attention to questions about identity, power, and history, making poems from source texts participants are interested in erasing.

JOIN US THAT EVENING AT 6:00pm! Williams will read some of their poems and invite workshop participants to share their texts as well, highlighting emerging, local talent.

Candace Williams is a black queer nerd living a double life. By day, they are a sixth grade humanities educator and robotics coach. By night and subway ride, they are a poet. Their chapbook, Spells for Black Wizards, was a 2017 TAR Chapbook Series winner and published by the Atlas Review. futureblack, their first full-length poetry manuscript, was a 2018 National Poetry Series finalist.

This event is exhibition programming for our current exhibition “Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text,” which features contemporary art that blurs distinctions between obscuring and revealing, and show how acts of erasure can uphold and subvert authority. It is on view through January 26th.
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