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Race, History and the Body
A Reading with Aimee Suzara, Heid E. Erdrich & Matthew Shenoda
Presented by Pangea World Theater
Co-sponsored by Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

The body has been both metaphor and literal site of contestation: the gazed upon, exhibited, racialized, gendered other. How do writers make social acts of resistance, mapping the histories of our bodies? How do we respond to the epidermalization of inferiority (Fanon) instilled by wars, colonization, and conquest? Diverse writers, hailing from Oakland, Minneapolis and Chicago, will read from their latest work, as ceremonial archaeologists digging the bones of our histories, returning them to sacred.

Venue

Pangea World Theater Studio
711 West Lake StreetMinneapolis, MN 55408

Show TImes

April 9, 2015 at 8:00pm 

Tickets 

$8 suggested donation at the door

Artists Bios

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer and educator whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Suzara has graced stages nationally, from Florida to Washington with her dynamic spoken word. Her debut poetry book, SOUVENIR (WordTech Editions 2014) was lauded as “a powerful meditation on history and the legacies of race, family and identity,” (David Mura), and her poems appear in numerous collections, including Phat’itude and Kartika Review. Her performance work has been supported by YBCAway Award, National Endowment for the Arts, East Bay Community Foundation commission; selected for the One Minute Play Festival, Playground, APAture, and Utah Arts Festival; and staged at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, CounterPULSE, and others. Luis J Rodriguez has said, “Aimee Suzara is a deep chronicler of our hopes, dreams, pains, and future. We need these poems more than ever.” www.aimeesuzara.net.

Matthew Shenoda’s writings have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation among others. His debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press), was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and was winner of a 2006 American Book Award. He is also the author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (BOA Editions Ltd.), and Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) and editor of Duppy Conqueror: New & Selected Poems by Kwame Dawes. He joined Columbia College Chicago as the Associate Dean of Fine and Performing Arts and is currently Associate Professor & Interim Chair of the Department of Creative Writing. Shenoda is also a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Series. He lives with his family in Chicago.

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of four collections of poetry including National Monuments, which won a Minnesota Book Award and Cell Traffic from U of Arizona Press. Her most recent book is a nonfiction work, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes from the Upper Midwest. She is an independent scholar and curator, as well as a playwright and filmmaker whose poem-films have been screened at festivals and have won awards including Best of Festival at Co-Kisser and SWIA. She also directs Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe language publisher. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Her degrees are from Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, and she earned a Doctorate from Union Institute. She has won awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, The Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and a City Pages Artists of the Year designation for 2013. Heid regularly serves as a visiting author, speaker, and scholar for colleges, universities, libraries, cultural and arts organizations. She teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program of Augsburg College.

 

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