- This event has passed.
Susan Briante and Valyntina Grenier at Wolfman Books
April 9, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
Briante and Grenier Take Heart and Deface the Monument at Wolfman.
ABOUT OUR BOOKS:
“Fever Dream / Take Heart is a doubled poetry book. Two chapbooks have been produced in a flip-book format [featuring paintings by Grenier]. Bound in the tête-bêche style, Fever Dream and Take Heart provide two forays through this poet’s feverishly delicious style.
Lifting off from nature, Grenier leaps intuitively between images that comment on humanity’s impact on the climate, corrosive politics, and all that is ferociously feminine.
Leap anywhere into these works and emerge with your senses swollen and your will to enact change fortified with iron.”
– Laine Cunningham, Solar Flairs for Sunspot Literary Journal
A former journalist turned university professor, Briante started taking students to the US-Mexico border three summers ago to research and write about migration issues. What began as essays documenting the immigration crisis turned into a reflection on the acts of witnessing and writing about the suffering of others. Part documentary, part lyric essay, part primer, Defacing the Monument is an exploration of the many ways we might tell stories and a guidebook for anyone who wants to write or offer help in this moment of crisis.
ABOUT US:
Susan Briante, is the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders all from Ahsahta Press. Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and (most recently) the Ucross Foundation. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to work with community-based environmental and social justice groups. New work appears in Guernica, High Country News and through the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day program. You can read more about Susan at susanbriante.com
Valyntina Grenier is a poet and visual artist living in Tucson, Arizona. She was born in Lancaster, California, and educated at The University of California, Berkeley, and St. Mary’s College, Moraga. Graduating with an MFA in poetry, she is self-taught as a painter, installation and Neon artist. In both language and visual art, she pushes the boundaries of representation and abstraction to create a vantage from which to view violence and prejudice. An LGBTQIA artist and activist, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lana Turner, High Shelf Press, JuxtaProse, Sunspot Lit, Bat City Review and The Impossible Beast: Poems of Queer Eroticism from Damaged Goods Press. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier