The Center for the Humanities
November 13 – 6:30 pm
Atmospheric Embroidery: Meena Alexander in Conversation with Kimiko Hahn and Patricia Spears Jones
About the event
Join poet and scholar Meena Alexander, who will read from her new book of poems Atmospheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press) and be joined in conversation with poets Kimiko Hahn and Patricia Spears Jones exploring questions of race, migration, memory, bodily violation and writing as a woman of color in New York City.
At the heart of Meena Alexander’s eighth volume of poetry Atmospheric Embroidery, is the poem cycle ‘Indian Ocean Blues’, a sustained meditation on the journey of the poet as a young child from India to Sudan. There are poems inspired by the drawings of children from war torn Darfur and others set in New York City in the present or in India — the suicide of a Dalit student, the gang rape of a young woman in Delhi. There are poems of love and poems of war. These sensual lyrics of body, memory, and place evoke the fragile, shifting nature of dwelling in our times.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and Society; Women’s Studies Certificate Program; M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies; the PhD Program in English; Poetics Group; Postcolonial Studies Group; and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
More information at the Center for the Humanities website.
