A Black Woman’s Avant Gardè

In this panel five renowned poets, Cynthia Manick, Natalie Graham, Tameka Cage Conley, and Anastacia-Reneé, with Nikia Chaney as moderator will discuss contemporary ideas of the black woman’s avant garde as they share their poetry and poetic endeavors to bring to light new ways of thinking about poetic layers and experimentation.

The contributions of black women poets should be included in definitions of the black avant garde. Black poets routinely experiment and innovate with visions of the future or the structural presentation and play of poems on the page. The black avant garde is rich with examples of poetic work in which forms seen as experimental and new are now taken for granted. But the avant garde for black women includes experimental poetic movements of subjectivity and interiority that is not as easy to define. For black women the avant garde is less about expressing performative aspects of innovation but more about illustrating and highlighting interior intersectional identities and concerns. Language is the backdrop to the absence of linear concepts that exist within. And the self, the body, the landscape, the subject, the sound, and the movements of those connections create expansive imaginable futures of possibilities that defy easy definition. Avant garde for black women demands a mirroring of paradoxical identities and a relationship to a self ever explored, one that is fully in the black woman’s intimate knowledge of intersectionality and her visceral immediate relationships with joy, trauma, love, loss, and spirituality.