Please join The Initiative on Race and Resilience for A Critical Discussion of Race and The Arts with the IRR Artists Natasha Trethewey, Dionne Bremyer, Xavier Navarro and Azareen Van Vliet Oloomi.
5:00pm - 6:30pm Discussion
6:30pm - 7:30pm Reception
Can't attend in person? Watch the live stream
Speakers
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012-2016). She is currently serving as the Artist in Residence at the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience.
Trethewey is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020); a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and five collections of poetry: Monument: Poems New & Selected (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the editor of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser (2021), Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems From Emerging Writers, and Best American Poetry 2017.
Dionne Irving Bremyer is an associate professor of English in Notre Dame's creative writing program and a faculty fellow at the Initiative on Race and Resilience. She writes fiction and nonfiction that investigates and questions personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world.
Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines
Xavier Navarro is an Assistant Professor, English and Creative Writing Faculty Fellow, Institute for Latino Studies; Faculty Fellow, Initiative on Race and Resilience English.
Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Named one of the writers to watch for fall 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Navarro Aquino is the author of the novel, Velorio out from HarperVia/HarperCollins and HarperCollins Español in January 2022. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. His poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and is anthologized in Thicker Than Water: New writing from the Caribbean by Peekash Press. Navarro Aquino has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of three novels, including Savage Tongues (Mariner, 2021), Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award for her debut novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012). Her work has been supported by an Aspen Institute Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from ART OMI and has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. Her work has been translated into half a dozen languages. She is the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a bi-annual symposium and lecture series that focuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by histories of territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination and gross human rights violations. She serves on the Board of Advisors for Notre Dame's Initiative on Race and Resilience.
Co-sponsors
- Creative Writing Program
- Department of Africana Studies
- Department of American Studies
- Department of English
- Gender Studies