Reading & Book Signing with Shayla Lawz

200 Stanger Street,Blacksburg VA 24061

21 June, 2022

Description

Shayla Lawz will read from her highly acclaimed book SPECULATION, n. and sign copies. SPECULATION, n. was listed on “A Short List of Books Ilya Kaminsky Loved in 2021” Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She is the inaugural Hurston/Wright Writer-in-Residence at Virginia Tech. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden (DiSC). Her writing and hybrid/sound work appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Catapult, and The Poetry Project, among others. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. REVIEWS OF SPECULATION, n. by Shayla Lawz While we are grounded in horrifying events like the murder of Sandra Bland, what surprises and inspires is Lawz’s refusal to despair: ‘I / understand living and dying as fact, but the / body that refuses death is a star.’ Despite the heavy scaffolding underpinning the collection, Lawz has promises to keep, and so many of these lines actively resist hopelessness, anchoring us with a recurring ‘HERE’: ‘i am trying to stay HERE with this image / this is all speculation / some kind of immortal matter.’ —Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation ‘sometimes i want to ask the earth, / was it beautiful here / without us’ writes Lawz in this virtuoso performance. Innovative, inimitable, endlessly urgent, speculation, n. is far more than just a collection of poems. It is a dazzling verbal and visual performance, a concerto, a book of our days that is as heart-wrenching as it is an accurate portrayal of what it means to live and sing in America today. ‘i’ve been seeing my body around // in the stairwell, in the house / and even at times in the mirror. in the news’ urging us to lift the veil and open our eyes. Some books you read and never forget. This is one of them. —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic A self immortalized in phantoms is at once gone and everywhere. This work chases that kind of selfless, misplaced, displaced, replaced, implacable self back into the world. ‘I am trying to forgive / I am learning about flight,’ that self admits, and the poems here teach us how to do both at once and survive it. They are as much encounters and visitations as they are recountments of an endless, endlessly threatened reunion between sound, song, memory, and the family that weaves itself through. —Harmony Holiday, author of Maafa --------------------- About Hurston/Wright Foundation The Hurston/Wright Foundation’s mission is to provide services, supports and opportunities that mentor, recognize and provide community for professional and aspiring Black writers. Workshops and classes taught by award-winning authors serve emerging and midcareer adult writers. More than a thousand Black writers have taken our classes since the first one in 1996, increasing diversity in the cultural community as they have gone on to create books and careers as professors, local cultural workers, and national thought leaders. Our first program, the Hurston/Wright Awards for College Writers, has honored 92 students, 30 of whom subsequently published books. Among them are Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Natalie Baszile (Queen Sugar) and Nate Marshall (Wild Hundreds). The Legacy Awards has honored more than 400 writers since 2002. The annual program was the brainchild of the late award-winning novelist E. Lynn Harris, who recognized that work by Black authors deserved more attention. Free public readings and events since 2014 have afforded thousands of readers in Washington, D.C., the opportunity to engage with hundreds of talented Black authors. Through a social justice lens, our work provides the necessary services, supports and opportunities for Black writers seeking to publish work within a publishing industry that has traditionally failed to publish work by Black writers proportionate to their population. We also recognize that our social activism aids in disrupting systems that hinder Black writers from having access to certain opportunities—from writing residencies to participation in quality writing workshops and craft talks. Our newest program for writers is our Hurston/Wright Writer-in-Residence program that begins this year. Our inaugural Writers-in-Residence (WiRs) are Destiny O. Birdsong and Shayla Lawz. This program is sponsored in part by Amazon, Hachette Book Group and supporters like you. Learn more here.