Eco-Stories: Poetry, Sci-Fi, and Storytelling
Workshops with Tjawangwa Dema and Kirk Sides

Admission is free and open to USC students only. 

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DESCRIPTION:
Join internationally acclaimed poet Tjawangwa Dema (TJ Dema) and groundbreaking scholar Kirk Sides for a day of workshops exploring how planetary and climate change affect our modes of knowledge production, storytelling, and aesthetic practice.

Schedule:
10 a.m.: Habitat: An Eco-Poetry Workshop with Tjawangwa Dema
In this intimate workshop, students will use eco-poetry to explore the complex intersections between race and the environment. Participants will discuss environmental change, cultural and historical archives and imagination, and how our political pasts inflect our planetary futures. 
 
12 p.m.: Science Fiction as Method: A Writing and Pedagogy Workshop with Kirk Sides
Kirk Sides, a groundbreaking eco-critical scholar, will lead a workshop examining how planetary shifts and the environmental crisis are forcing us to question foundational narrative structures and consider radical new ways to think about what it means to do academic and cultural work in the Anthropocene (the current planetary age).
 
Bios:
Tjawangwa Dema (TJ Dema) is the author of The Careless Seamstress, which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. An honorary senior research associate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol, Dema is a poet, arts administrator, and teaching artist whose work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Kalahari Review, Cordite Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, German, Chinese, and Swedish, reworked by bands into lyrics, used for theatre and dance collaborations, recorded as videos, and dropped from a helicopter over London.
 
Kirk Sides is a professor of world literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. He works on African literature and the environment, focusing on histories of ecological thinking, and how climate change is currently being imagined in African writing and film. Sides lives and works in Bristol and continues to write and research in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Gaborone, Botswana.
 
Related Event:
A Poetics of Inquiry
A Reading and Conversation with Tjawangwa Dema 
Thursday, February 25, 2021, at 12 p.m. 
Online Event
For more info, click here.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Organized by Indra N. Mukhopadhyay (Writing Program). Co-sponsored by the Pan-African Student Association and the Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs.

Photo (TJ Dema): Petra Rolinec