Happy 2016! New Poem, New Essay

Thanks for stopping by to see what I've been up to as I've been hiding on the Inter/net(s).

A new poem, "Games," has been published in the new sports-themed Prairie Schooner (http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/prairie-schooner-news), guest-edited by Natalie Díaz.

Later this year, a lengthy close reading of Bob Kaufman's "Grandfather Was Queer, Too" will emerge in a special issue of Obsidian, marking its 20th-anniversary Furious Flower Conference, where I presented with Drs. Jericho Brown, Roger Reeves, Mendi Lewis Obadike, and Dawn Lundy Martin on a critics’ roundtable, “Going Too Far: The Queer Poetics Distraction from Issues of Race and Class.”

My talk, “Hush, Somebody’s Calling Me Out of My Name: The Fact of Quareness," focused mostly on Phillis Wheatley's transgressions against gender norms & her invocation of erotic imagery in famous myths to articulate her own forestalled sexual agency. However, Kaufman's poem kept haunting me.

Let's hope the reading illuminates more about one of the most enigmatic, original voices in African American poetics. Let's hope this Wheatley essay finds a home this year.

Yours,

Lamar