I come
from a family
that twice names
its own.
One name
for the world.
– Traci Dant, “A Twice Named Family”
Gilded, the jaw forgets
fracture at the pointer’s tip
(red jaw, forgotten rings
inadvertent discord, picked up,
thrown into anger). To say
I feel like breaking something
– Duriel Harris, “self portrait in relief”
If it be warfare, let it be mistress
and midnight up that slope,
not reticent in a weather
of withdrawal, its salmon-roe tint,
the shabby grass it grazes
– Andrew Zawacki, “Any Other Eviction, Than The Frequent”
Featured Readers
Thursday, March 6, 2003
American Poets Reading
with Traci Dant, Duriel Harris, and Patricia McMillen
Watch Andrew Zawacki read his work at the University of Richmond Writers’ Series:
Duriel E. Harris is a poet, performer, and sound artist. She is author of the poetry collections No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (Nightboat, 2017), Drag (2003), and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include her one-woman theatrical performance Thingification, as well as Speleology (2011), a video collaboration with artist Scott Rankin. Recent and upcoming appearances include performances at the Lake Forest College Allan L. Carr Theatre, the Chicago Jazz Festival (with Douglas Ewart & Inventions), the Greenhouse Theater (Chicago), the Naropa Capitalocene, the Votive Poetics Workshop (New Zealand), and Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana (Cuba).
Cofounder of the avant-garde poetry/performance trio the Black Took Collective, and of Call & Response, a dynamic of Black women and performance. Harris has been a MacDowell and Millay Colony fellow and has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her work has appeared widely, including BAX, Mandorla, The &Now Awards, Of Poetry & Protest, Ploughshares, Troubling the Line, and The Best of Fence; and her compositions have been translated into Polish, German, and Spanish.
Harris earned degrees in literature from Yale University and New York University, and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago Program for Writers. She is an associate professor of English in the graduate creative writing program at Illinois State University and the editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.