The Poetry Center’s In Common Writers Series welcomes poet Prageeta Sharma, visiting from Los Angeles, together with Dodie Bellamy, of San Francisco, reading and in conversation. This event, the second of two evenings featuring these two writers, is supported by The Walter & Elise Haas Fund, and is free and open to the public.
Dodie Bellamy’s writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions among fiction, the essay, and poetry. She was the 2018–19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’ On Our Mind program, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading-group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. Her most recent collection of hybrid essays is When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e), 2015). A 17th-Anniversary editon of Cunt-Ups, her long out-of-print poetry collection, was released by Tender Buttons Press in 2018. Her essay “The Beating of Our Hearts” was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian, she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017). In February 2020, Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind, a compendium of essays examining her career and writing, is forthcoming from Semiotext(e).
- What is explicit now is that I had been a defenseless dependent for those years. I wasn’t hedging a bet with a life then. I was just helping myself to it and to the party of coupledom in its normality, in its rewording of intimate interferences, and to this one person I loved. I ground life to a powder underfoot, with the dominion of freedom in front of me. We both did carelessly then. We shared a grief of what disturbed us about others, but it lived only in a grievance and in the exterior walls. But then this, and I stopped being in those perceptual truths, of the mind’s eye seeing who was where; this was a kind of luxury of living in knowingness. I gave that up without understanding I had to…. —Prageeta Sharma, from Grief Sequence
Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award, she has taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.