Quiet, A Reading, Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Monday, February 5, 2024 1:30 PM to 2:45 PM EST
Fenwick Library, Fenwick Reading Room, 4400 University Dr, Fairfax, VA
The Cheuse Center, The Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGST)
& African and African American Studies (AAAS) present:
QUIET by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY, a black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of “quiet” in producing forms of community, resistance, and love.
“Bulley’s stunning poems draw you in with their melodious versatility, intellect and dexterity; [they] perfectly embody the political through the personal.”—Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other.
How does one encounter meaning amid so many kinds of noise? What is quiet when it isn’t silence? With a metaphysical edge and a formal restlessness attuned to both the sonics and the inadequacies of language, Quiet navigates the tension between the impulse to guard one’s inner life and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes,
“your silence will not protect you.”
The book launch and reading will be followed by a conversation with Vivek Narayanan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, a writer, and an artist. An alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, she has held residencies in the United States and Brazil, and in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is the recipient of a Techne scholarship for doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR VIVEK NARAYANAN was born in India to Tamil parents and grew up in Zambia. He earned a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and a master’s in creative writing from Boston University. He has taught at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and in the mid-2000s worked at Sarai-CSDS, a center for experimental practice and theory in New Delhi. His books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S and, most recently, After (NYRB Poets, 2022). A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019.
This program is brought to you through a partnership with the Lannan Center at Georgetown University and co-sponsored by Women and Gender Studies and the African and African American Studies Department at Mason.
