April 3: Ed Pavlic, Poetry Reading & HBA Lecture

She was here yesterday,
sat off in the grass like Sade
sounds in the shade. Damned
if something something ain’t right
about how we do each other
wrong. If you pass it to Ranger,
don’t come around tomorrow.
— Ed Pavlic, from Give It, Up (2001)

“I confess that, even in the abstract, I have never been able to acquire a knack for honoring the supposed impermeability of American racial categories. Just where is the border in what one says, thinks, imagines, who one loves? Even more, where is the border in how one goes about these things? My racial ambiguity has not only been internal but has been reflected in—perhaps fueled by—the ways that, since childhood, my race has been so frequently “misread,” or far from self-evident. More than once in my twenties, police asked me point blank: Are you black or white? In these previews of often subtler interrogations to come, it always seemed to me that the question was the answer.”
— Ed Pavlic, from “We Called That Touch” (Boston Review, March 28 2016)

Ed Pavlic, Distinguished Research Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, writes urgently and distinctively of race and identity in the US, from Gaza to Georgia.
Author of several collections of poetry and of a new book of criticism on James Baldwin and music, he will be visiting Scripps College to lend us his vision of the possibilities for inter-racial
understanding for better futures.

Please join us for a noon poetry reading April 3rd, co-sponsored by Scripps Presents, the Scripps English Department, and myself, the HBA Chair
(feel free to bring your lunch; Scripps College, Hampton Room):
http://www.scrippscollege.edu/events/calendar/seeing-with-your-life-a-poetry-reading
Upcoming Events Seeing With Your Life: A Poetry Reading – Events
http://www.scrippscollege.edu
Ed Pavlić is author of seven collections of poems and two critical books. His most recent works include, Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners, Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno, and Visiting Hours at the Color Line.