Living Free: Can art save? - Creative work in an unfree world

Lecture and conversation with National Book Award finalist, Solmaz Sharif (Poet, author of Look).

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with  a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an NEA fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Conversation facilitated by Mark Gonzales (wethepeopleare.org).

What does it mean to live free? It is often said that the one demand for the Movement for Black Lives is to “stop killing us.” This demand has led Black artists, thinkers, organizers, and healers to envision work and embody practices that resist the subjugation and erasure of their bodies. This surge of creativity has impacted and intersected with work happening in queer and trans communities and in many other communities of color. This justice based work urges us to interrupt systems of violence with systems of healing that recover traditions, invent new modalities, and connect to survival practices developed by many generations of people in community.

In this course we will bring together leadings artists, thinkers, organizers, and healers to envision work and embody practices that resist the subjugation and erasure of their bodies, land, and natural resources.

This event is part of a series of lectures for the course Living Free: Embodying healing and creativity. All events are free and open to the public, and will be available online at diversityarts.stanford.edu one week behind scheduled engagement.