Join Alexa Patrick and special guests for a celebration of her debut poetry collection Remedies for Disappearing. This event took place on June 6, 2023.

In this beautiful debut from an exciting new poet, Alexa Patrick’s Remedies for Disappearing memorializes Blackness in its quiet and unexpected forms, bringing the peripheral into focus. These poems muddy Black life and death, observe lineage and love stories, and question what “disappearing” teaches about Blackness and bodies.

Remedies for Disappearing is gritty, sharp, and formally inventive, demonstrating Patrick’s imaginative curiosity, lyrical restraint, and confidence in her handling of language. Moments of aphoristic confession are balanced with imagistic precision as the speaker recounts the ways her aunties, sisters, and even herself have disappeared in order to survive.

Patrick’s poetry is haunting and hopeful, striving to provide readers with the tools and context to acknowledge, define, and honor the complexity of Black girl/womanhood. Remedies for Disappearing connects Black girls and women to each other and to their own histories, and insists that they be fully and wholly seen.

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Speakers:

Alexa Patrick is a poet and vocalist from Connecticut. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Tin House alumna. She has also been cast in the featured role of Unsung in We Shall Not Be Moved, an opera under the direction of Bill T. Jones. You may find Alexa’s work published in The Quarry, The Rumpus, CRWN Magazine, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic.

Raina León is a teacher, writer, artist, curator, scholar, and speaker. You might know her as a founding editor of The Acentos Review, the lead coordinator for Nomadic Press Philadelphia, the author of black god mother this body, and co-founder of StoryJoy, Inc. with Dr. Norma Thomas. She does lots of things and invites you to dream with her sometime.

Jasmine Mans is a Black poet and performance artist from Newark, New Jersey. Jasmine’s poetry book, BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME has been named one of Oprah’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books and a TIME Magazine Must Read, to name a few; and Jasmine herself named as Essence’s #1 Contemporary Black Poet to Know. Jasmine most recently collaborated with the Brooklyn Ballet on an original performance piece titled Unnatural Surrounding at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Gabriel Ramirez, a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, and a participant in the Callaloo Writers Workshops. You can find his work in publications like The Volta, Split This Rock, VINYL, Acentos Review as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.

Kush Thompson, author of A Church Beneath the Bulldozer (2014), is a Chicago-born poet, painter, archivist, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Voted runner-up best local poet of 2014 by The Chicago Reader, a 2015 Young Futurist by The Root, and a 2017 Pink Door & Luminarts Creative Writing Fellow, Thompson's contributed over a decade of performances and creative writing workshops, both nationally and internationally.

Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/naG3oOfqw6g

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