Cane: A New Critical Edition

$64.00

A new critical edition for the 100th anniversary of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel

LYRIC FICTION / CRITICAL INVITATION / ORACULAR CARD DECK

Available exclusively here and in select indie bookstores: in Brooklyn at Taylor & Co. Books and in Seattle at Elliott Bay Book Company

Bookstores, museums, libraries & schools can order through our distributor, Asterism Books.

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Description

About the Book & Oracular Card Deck

Considered a masterpiece of American modernist literature, Jean Toomer’s Cane calls down through time from the Harlem Renaissance. First published in 1923, Cane was unlike anything published before and in 2023 it remains a necessary alternative to the conventions of literature and publishing. Impossible to categorize, enigmatic, unhesitating, of its time and of our time, Cane could be called a collection of stories, a play waiting to be staged, a songbook, a novel, a catalogue of Jim Crow the Great Migration, the self-portrait of a Black man who refused to claim or be claimed by race. With this 100th anniversary edition, we reimagine the critical edition as a set of cards that do not encase the book in thought and theory but invite readers to move with its movements, to employ its imaginative technologies, to be with its phenomena outside of time, for, as Toomer writes, “Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.”

Our 100th anniversary celebration of Cane is an invitation to wonder, speculate, imagine and create. We present our beautifully designed, faithful edition of the genre-defying classic along with a deck of striking, large-format oracular cards.

Black thinkers and makers from across and between creative, scholarly and community practices have convened for this project. They offer their insights in the form of prompts, gestures, images, questions, calls to respond…each authored for this edition presented on a card, paired with an evocative, timeless quote from Cane.

Use the deck and book together for insight into Cane. Or use the cards on their own for creative inspiration and oracular insight. Portals out of ordinary time.


Included in this set:

  • Our beautifully designed, faithful edition of Cane by Jean Toomer
  • A boxed deck of 52 large-format oracular cards
  • A companion booklet with more insights into the book and cards, information about contributors and an index of the book’s images, ideas and themes.
  • All elements of this set feature cover art by Barbara Earl Thomas.

About the Author

Jean Toomer, 1894-1967, was a poet, playwright and novelist. Son of a formerly enslaved, mixed-race farmer, grandson of the first Black governor during Reconstruction, Toomer resisted identification with race, choosing to call himself an “American.”


The Oracular Card Deck Contributorsalea adigweme, photo by Jaimie Milner • Alexis Pauline Gumbs, photo by Sufia Ikbal-Doucet • Andrew E. Colarusso, photo by Arvind Ranganathan • Angela Davis Johnson, photo by Celia D. Luna • Aricka Foreman, photo by Robert Martinez • Arielle Julia Brown, photo by Angel Edwards • Awoye Timpo, photo by Hollis King • Barbara Earl Thomas, photo by Jovelle Tamayo • Bettina Judd, photo courtesy of the author • Bill Lowe, photo by Peter Gannushkin • Canisia Lubrin, photo by Clea Christakos-Gee • Christina Sharpe, photo courtesy of the author • Daniel Alexander Jones, photo courtesy of Cal Arts • David Thomson, photo by Sylvain Guenot • Desiree C. Bailey, photo by Wilton Schereka • Dominique Rider, photo by Raphael Saddick • Douglas Kearney, photo by Bao Phi • Dr. Elijah Heyward III, photo courtesy of Yale University • drea brown, photo courtesy of the author • El/yse Ambrose, photo courtesy of the author • Gabrielle Civil, photo courtesy of the author • Jefferson Pinder, photo by Luis Acosta Tejada • John Keene, photo by Nina Subin • K’eguro Macharia, photo courtesy of the author • Kameelah Janan Rasheed, photo by Grant Delin • Kevin Adonis Browne, photo by Dawn Cumberbatch • m. nourbeSe philip, photo by Gail Nyoka • Malcolm Tariq, photo by Karisma Price • Maya Marshall, photo by Ashley Kauschinger • Nikky Finney, photo by Forrest Clonts • Nissy Aya, photo by Halima McDoom • Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, photo by Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees • Phillip Howze, photo courtesy of the author • Phillip B. Williams, photo by Nicholas Nichols • Quenton Baker, photo by Dean Davis • Rinaldo Walcott, photo by Abdi Osman • Sarah Stefana Smith, photo by Adrian White • Sharon Bridgforth, photo by Nia Witherspoon • Sheree Renée Thomas, photo by Danian Darrell Jerry • Tchaiko Omawale, photo by Brinson + Banks • Therí Alyce Pickens, photo by Jason Douglas Lewis • Jean Toomer, photo courtesy of the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library


Project Editors

Diane Exavier
Carlos Sirah
Anne de Marcken

 

 

 

 

 

Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker and educator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. She is author of the poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix and the chapbook Teaches of Peaches. Diane concerns herself with what she recognizes as the 4 L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Her work has been presented with The New Group, BRIC Arts, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, and more. She has been commissioned for new play development by the Sloan Foundation, The New Group, and Lucille Lortel Theatre. A 2021 Jerome Foundation finalist, Diane lives and works in Brooklyn.

Carlos Sirah is a writer, performer, dramaturg, and cultural worker who creates formal structures rooted in Black expressions of possibility that take the shape of concert, lyric prose, procession, film, and stageplays. Sirah’s transdisciplinary work draws from the legacy of multiple traditions: Black Arts Movement,  Black Radical Tradition, Theatrical Jazz, and Blues. His work has been supported with residencies or grants from the Vermont Studio Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ragdale, The Hambidge Center, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Millay Colony, The Blue Mountain Center, Network of Ensemble Theatres, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Writers Guild Foundation. Sirah is a member of the Remember2019 collective. Sirah has been a MacDowell fellow and holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University.

Anne de Marcken is Editor and Publisher of The 3rd Thing. An interdisciplinary writer and artist, she is author of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, and The Accident: An Account. Her work in writing, film and site-specific installation has garnered numerous awards as well as grant and fellowship support from the Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Centrum, Artist Trust, the Hafer Family Foundation and elsewhere. She lives in Olympia at the southern tip of the Salish Sea.


From Cane

The sun is hammered to a band of gold. Pine-needles, like mazda, are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up. Marvelous web spun by the spider sawdust pile. Curls up and spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along the eastern valley. A black boy … you are the most sleepiest man I ever seed, Sleeping Beauty … cradled on a gray mule, guided by the hollow sound of cow-bells, heads for them through a rusty cotton field. From down the railroad track, the chug-chug of a gas engine announces that the repair gang is coming home. A girl in the yard of a whitewashed shack not much larger than the stack of worn ties piled before it, sings. Her voice is loud. Echoes, like rain, sweep the valley. Dusk takes the polish from the rails. Lights twinkle in scattered houses. From far away, a sad strong song. Pungent and composite, the smell of farmyards is the fragrance of the woman. She does not sing; her body is a song. She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare .. juju men, greegree, witch-doctors .. torches go out… The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa. – from Cane by Jean Toomer, 1923/2023


About the Contributors

alea adigweme is an antidisciplinary Igbo-Vincentian-U.S.-ian cultural worker who utilizes the mediums of creative writing, book arts, performance, community engagement, installation, video, and other visual media. alea is the author of birdbolt idolatry, a poetry chapbook (dancing girl press, 2015), and her written work has been published by outlets including BustleCritical Studies in Media Communication, FightlandGawker, and the Iowa Review blog. Her visual work has been shown at Public Space One (Iowa City), New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), and online. In 2020, her experimental short film [untitled]screened in competition at the New Orleans Film Festival. More information about her work can be found at her website www.alea.me.

El/yse Ambrose, Ph.D. is a blackqueer ethicist, creative, and educator. Ambrose’s forthcoming book, A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, London) offers a transreligious and communal-based ethics of sexuality grounded in blackqueer archive. Their most recent photo-sonic exhibition, “Spirit in the Dark Body: Black Queer Expressions of the Im/material” explores blackqueer and blacktrans spiritualities, identity, and poiesis. Currently serving as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Black Study at the University of California, Riverside, their work and commentary have been featured in Huffington Post, the podcast Contemplating Now, Medium, ForHarriet.com, Vice, and CBC Radio One’s Tapestry.

Nissy Aya is a Black girl from the Bronx. She is a writer, educator, and cultural worker who believes in the transformative nature of storytelling and sees theatre as a tool to create social change by empowering disenfranchised communities to unapologetically portray their whole selves on stage. She is a trained facilitator on topics surrounding the intersections of identity, power and privilege and how those intersections influence structures of oppression. As an artist, her work centers the voices of Black women, explores the lines between history and memory, details both the presence and absence of love and recounts extremely tall tales.

Desiree C. Bailey is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. She is the author of What Noise Against the Cane which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. What Noise Against the Cane was also a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University.

Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Their current focus is black interiority and the afterlife of slavery. Their work has appeared in The Offing, Jubilat, Vinyl, The Rumpus and elsewhere. They are a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. They were a 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence and a 2021 NEA Fellow. They are the author of we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing, 2021) and ballast (Haymarket Books, 2023).

A 2023 United States Artists Fellow, Sharon Bridgforth is a 2022 Winner of Yale’s Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, a 2020-2023 Playwrights’ Center Core Member, a 2022-2023 McKnight National Fellow and a New Dramatists alumnae. She has received support from The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Her work is featured in Feminist Studies Vol 48 Number 1, honoring 40 years of This Bridge Called by Back and But Some of Us Are Brave! Sharon’s new book, bull-jean & dem/dey back (53rd State Press 10/2022) features two performance/novels produced by Pillsbury House + Theatre in Minneapolis 2023.

Arielle Julia Brown (she/her)is a multidisciplinary cultural worker who commands and directs cultural spaces as sites for radical imagination, vision building and social transformation in her communities. Raised between Hayward California and Conley Georgia by her beloved migratory people, Arielle now also calls Philadelphia, PA home. Arielle’s practices traverse cultural strategy, performance curation, dramaturgy, facilitation and performance making. Arielle is the founder, director and curator of Black Spatial Relics, a convener, developer, supporter and presenter of Black radical performance. Arielle is also a co-producer of Remember2019, an eight year effort to center the congregation of Black Phillips County residents in the wake of the Elaine Massacre. Arielle was a 2019 Monument Lab National Fellow. Arielle is a 2021 Leeway Transformation Awardee. Arielle is in the inaugural cohort (2021 -2024) of Called By Water conceived and led by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Sharon Bridgforth.

drea brown is a black queer feminist poet-scholar, the author of dear girl: a reckoning (Gold Line Press 2015), and co-editor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press 2021). Their writing has appeared in publications such as HypatiaA Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander, About Place Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, and Zócalo Public Square. drea is currently an assistant professor in the English Department at Texas State University.

Kevin Adonis Browne is a Caribbean American artist, essayist, and theorist of rhetoric and contemporary culture. He is the author of Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean and High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture, which won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2019. His latest book project, a multimodal collection of essays, is entitled A Sense of Arrival. He is also the creator of The No Words Project and co-founder (with Dawn Cumberbatch) of the Caribbean Memory Project. Previous solo exhibitions include “Seeing Blue” (2014) “High Mas” (2018), “No Words” (2021), and “A Sense of Arrival” (2022). He is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse University, New York.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance artworks including Translated Bodies (2023), the déjà vu—live (2022), and Jupiter (2021). In summer 2023, she served as a Performance Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), and the déjà vu (2022). Her writing has also appeared in New Daughters of AfricaKitchen Table TranslationMigrating Pedagogies, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook.  The aim of her work is to open up space.

Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He is author of The Sovereign (Dalkey Archive, 2017), Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Souvenirs (with Karen An-hwei Lee; Baobab Press, 2022) and Hívado (Flood Editions, 2022). His writing has been published in CallalooCallaloo Art, FENCE, and 3:AM Magazine. Colarusso runs the independent bookstore Taylor & Co. in Flatbush, and is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Broome Street Review, an independently published literary journal dedicated to art and culture at the vanguard.

Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of GauzeRiceThe World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020. Finney is Carolina Distinguished Professor at USC in Columbia where she is also Director of the Ernest A. Finney Jr. Cultural Arts Center.

Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit, Michigan. Author of Dream with a Glass Chamber and Salt Body Shimmer, winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, she has earned writing fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Millay Arts. Her poetry and essays have been featured in Catapult, Black Warrior Review, Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching On Black Life and Literature, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and in the Academy of American Poets, amongst several others. She lives in Chicago, Illinois and works as a publicist for Haymarket Books.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a cherished oracle and community accountable queer Black feminist author and scholar. She is a granddaughter of the Anguillian revolution, an aspirational cousin to all life, an exuberant facilitator, student, mentor and educator. Devoted listener and multi-dimensional archivist, Alexis honors Black feminism as a spiritual tradition, a political legacy and a relevant resource for everyone on the planet. Alexis is co-founder of MOBILE HOMECOMING, where she partners with Sangodare to connect generations of LGBTQ Black Visionaries to each other in a myriad of tangible ways that constitute an experiential archive of sustainable brilliance. Author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, Alexis is an Experimental writer whose textual ceremonies transform her community’s sense of possibility. Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies, Writing Matters! series co-editor for at Duke University Press, 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction and 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize winners in Poetry, Alexis activates language to connect us to the constant presence of generations of love.

Dr. Elijah Heyward III is a pop culture and art enthusiast, as well as an expert on African American history, religion, and contemporary Gullah/Geechee culture. His scholarship explores southern culture through the lens of contemporary Gullah Geechee Identity. His practice spans film, documentary photography, and curatorial projects. After graduating from Yale Divinity School, Dr. Heyward earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. During his time in Chapel Hill, he curated the show “Beyond Walls: Designs for 20th Century Murals at the Ackland Art Museum” and contributed to a traveling exhibition focused on the work of artist Ronald Lockett. He also served as the Chief Operating Officer of the International African American Museum in Charleston. Dr. Heyward was the 2021 recipient of the Yale Divinity School Lux et Veritas award.

Phillip Howze is an American playwright and educator whose works have been produced at theaters across the country. He’s a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a MAP Fund recipient, and a Resident Writer at Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3 where he is commissioned to write a new play. He was recently appointed the inaugural Associate Senior Lecturer at Harvard University’s Theater, Dance & Media program. His new play collection RARITIES & WONDERS: PLAYS is available from Tripwire Harlot Press.

Angela Davis Johnson creates paintings, installations, and ritual performances to reflect life from a Southern Black femme experience. She co-created Hollerin Space, an interactive archival performance with partner muthi reed. Her work has been exhibited widely and extensively which includes front porches, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Mississippi Museum of Art, and the Delta Exhibition in Little Rock, AR. The mother of two has deep roots in the Arkansas Delta and continues to create while migrating and maintaining a studio in Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Daniel Alexander Jones’s critically-acclaimed performance pieces include Black Light (Public Theater, Greenwich House Theatre); Duat (Soho Rep); An Integrator’s Manual (La MaMa, Fusebox Festival); and Radiate (Soho Rep and National Tour) His book of plays and performance texts, Love Like Light (53rd State Press) was published alongside the volume Particle & Wave, a conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Jones has recorded six albums of original songs as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones and created the digital project www.aten.life. Daniel has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Artist Award, the Idea Award in Theatre, a USA Artist Fellowship, two Art Matters grants, the PEN America/Laura Pels Award in Theatre, and the Alpert Award in the Arts, from CalArts where he is currently a producing artist with the Center for New Performance.

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones brings Black Feminist praxis and theatrical jazz principles to her artmaking, scholarship, and facilitation. Her original performances include sista docta, a critique of academic life, and Searching for Ọ̀ṣun, an ethnographic performance installation around the Divinity of the River. She was featured in the premiere of Sharon Bridgforth’s bull-jean/we wake at Pillsbury House Theatre.  Her most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, a collaborative ethnography focusing on three theatrical jazz practitioners. Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos and Barbara Ann Teer are among Jones’ closest mentors. She is Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, a mother, a Queer wife, and a curious sojourner.

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is Black women’s creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) and the poetry collection, patient, winner of the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally. She is currently Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Douglas Kearney has published seven books including Sho, Buck Studies, Someone Took They Tongues and Mess and Mess and. Fodder, an LP featuring Kearney and frequent collaborator/SoundChemist, Val Jeanty, was published by Fonograf Editions in 2021, and he has had four operas staged, most recently Sweet Land. Kearney has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, Pen American, and Minnesota Book Award. A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul.

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas (2015), which received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (2021), received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

Bass trombonist and tubaist Bill Lowe has been a major force in the music world for close to fifty years as a performer, composer, producer, and educator. He has worked with most of the masters of African American creative music, across all genres and musical cliques, from musical legends like Dizzy Gillespie, Eartha Kitt, and Clark Terry, to the leaders of the avant-garde like Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and Cecil Taylor, to under-heralded greats like George Russell, James Jabbo Ware and Bill Barron. Lowe has taught at several major universities, lectured throughout the world from Cuba to Paris, and mentored countless young musicians.

Signifyin’ Natives is an ongoing project of rotating personnel under Bill Lowe’s leadership. The band has performed in several interdisciplinary productions, including Ed Bullins’ Street Sounds and Lowe’s own adaptation of  Cane. This iteration of the ensemble, which toured and recorded in 2021 in celebration of Bill’s 75th birthday, brings together new and old collaborators from Lowe’s long and distinguished career: saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, coronetist Taylor Ho Bynum, pianist Kevin Harris, bassist Ken Filiano, drummer Luther Gray, and vocalist Naledi Masilo.

Canisia Lubrin’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Derek Walcott Prize, and others. At the University of Guelph she teaches and coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell prize for poetry. Code Noir: Metamorphoses (Knopf, 2024) is her debut fiction. She is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart/PRH.

K’eguro Macharia imagines freedom from Nairobi, Kenya, lingering at the seam of Africa and the Black Diaspora. He is the author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019).

Maya Marshall is the author of All the Blood Involved in Love and Secondhand. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She works as an editor for Haymarket Books, and she is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Adelphi University, and in 2018, she cofounded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center and elsewhere. Marshall was raised in Texas and Georgia, earned her MFA from the University of South Carolina, and made a home in Chicago for nearly twenty years. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tchaiko Omawale’s filmmaking practice is inspired by her upbringing as a Third Culture Kid. Her creative work speaks to a sense of in-between-ness and its effects on the body and spirit. It centers themes of magic, self-destruction and the interiority of Black women. Her debut feature film SOLACE about a Black girl with an eating disorder premiered at LA Film Festival and won Special Jury Mention for Best Ensemble Cast. Her episodic credits include Queen Sugar, Cherish The Day, Sacrifice and Good Trouble. Her commercial/branded work included My Black Is Beautiful ft Yvonne Orji and Pinterest ft Tracee Ellis Ross. See her work at www.tchaiko.com

Born in Tobago, M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet without ambition who is also an essayist, novelist, and playwright.  She lives in the space-time of Toronto.  A former lawyer, her published works include the award-winning YA novel, Harriet’s Daughter, the seminal poetry collection, She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, the speculative prose poem, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, as well as her genre-breaking book-length epic, Zong!.  M. NourbeSe Philip is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio) and in 2020 was the recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2021 she was awarded the Arts Molson Prize by the Canada Council for “invaluable contributions to literature.”

Therí Alyce Pickens is a poet, a scholar and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Diode, and Black Renaissance Noire, and she is editor of Arab American Aesthetics: Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre. Pickens is a Professor of English specializing in African American, Arab American and Disability Studies.

Jefferson Pinder has produced highly praised performance-based and multidisciplinary work for over a decade. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, The High Museum in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and Tate Modern in London, UK. In 2017, Pinder received a Guggenheim Fellowship; he also won a 2016 USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance, and in 2017 the Moving Image Acquisition Award. Most recently, he was named a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Pinder received a BA in Theatre and an MFA in Mixed Media from the University of Maryland, and studied at the Asolo Theatre Conservatory in Sarasota, FL. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland from 2003-2011. He is currently Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations, No New Theories, and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks. Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. Rasheed’s work has been exhibited widely, both in the United States and internationally at the Brooklyn Museum; the New Museum, MASS MoCA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the 57th Venice Biennial, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Her public installations have appeared an array of venues including Ballroom Marfa; the Brooklyn Museum; For Freedoms x Times Square Art, New York; Public Art Fund, New York. Rasheed is the owner and founder of Orange Tangent Study, and founder of Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive documenting how Black faith lives, shifts, and self-revises. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee.

Dominique Rider is a Brooklyn-based director whose work seeks to answer the question: “What is a world unmade by slavery?” while attempting to analyze the layers of anti-blackness that maintain the world we live in. Deploying theatre and performance as tools of Afropessimism, Dominique has developed and staged work with The Park Avenue Armory, Audible, The New Group, NYTW, Roundabout, The Atlantic, Princeton, Rattlestick, BRIC Arts, Two River, Portland Center Stage, and more. Past fellowships/residencies include Hi-Arts, The National Black Theatre, TheaterWorks Hartford, NYSAF, BRIC Arts, Roundabout, and NAMT. Dominique is a producer with CLASSIX.

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke 2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke 2016), and Ordinary Notes (Knopf, FSG, and Daunt 2023).

Sarah Stefana Smith is an artist and scholar who works predominantly in sculpture and installation. Through the visual forms of archives and repurposed materials, the artist considers questions of repair, disrepair, and lines of demarcation around difference, human, and species. Smith has exhibited widely, having held residencies with MASS MoCA, the University of Pittsburgh the Creatives Project with the Center for Humanities, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. Sarah has published writing in the Drain: Journal of Art and Culture, Bmore Magazine, Journal of Women & Performance (2018), and The Black Scholar (2019) to name a few. Smith is currently working on their first book project, Poetics of Bafflement: Aesthetics of Frustration. They are Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. www.sarahstefanasmith.com

Malcolm Tariq is a poet and playwright from Savannah, Georgia. He is the author of Heed the Hollow (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2020 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, and Extended Play (Gertrude Press, 2017). He was a 2016-2017 playwriting apprentice at Horizon Theatre Company and a 2020-2021 resident playwright with Liberation Theatre Company. A graduate of Emory University, Malcolm holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Barbara Earl Thomas is a Seattle-based visual artist with an active art-making career that spans more than 30 years. Working in paint, papercut, printmaking, installation, glass and words, she pulls from mythology and history to create a contemporary visual narrative that challenges the stories we tell as Americans about who we are. Thomas’s works are included in the collections of the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland Art Museums, Chrysler Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Bainbridge Island Art Museum, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Washington State and Seattle City public collections, and have been featured nationally at John Braseth Gallery at the Seattle Art Fair, EXPO Chicago, Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, and with Claire Oliver Gallery (New York). Recent works include a commission for Yale University’s Hopper College as well as two major exhibitions, Geography of Innocence, Seattle Art Museum, Packaged Black, a collaboration with New York-based artist Derrick Adams at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, and solo exhibits at Claire Oliver Gallery and Chrysler Museum of Art. In 2022 Thomas was appointed as an Associate Fellow at Yale University. She has received the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award, the Washington State Governor’s Arts award, Artist Trust Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award and the Seattle Stranger Genius Award for excellence in the arts. Thomas’s work is featured on the covers of The 3rd Thing’s 2023 Cohort.

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling fiction writer, poet, and a Hugo Award-nominated editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science, and Mississippi Delta conjure. She is author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, the Marvel novel, Black Panther: Panther’s Rage, an adaptation of Don McGregor’s legendary comics, and two multigenre collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies. Thomas edited the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning Dark Matter speculative fiction anthologies that introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945-2010). She collaborated with Janelle Monáe on “Timebox Altar(ed)” in The Memory Librarian and Other Stories from Dirty Computer. She is the Associate Editor of the historic Black arts journal, Obsidian, and Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949Thomas is a Marvel writer and contributor to Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.

David Thomson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity.  His history encompasses the work of Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Kaneza Schaal, Meg Stuart, Alain Buffard, Okwui Okpokwasili and Matthew Barney among many others, he joined Yvonne’s Raindears in 2015. Awards and fellowships include United States Artists|Ford, NYFA in Choreography, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Thomson is currently a Mabou Mines Associate Artist and Danspace Research Fellow. He initiated The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment.

Awoye Timpo is a Brooklyn-based Director and Producer.  Her recent New York credits include Elyria by Deepa Purohit (Atlantic Theater), Wedding Band by Alice Childress (Theatre for a New Audience), In Old Age by Mfoniso Udofia (New York Theatre Workshop), The Loophole by Jay Adana and Zeniba Britt (Public Theater), Carnaval by Nikkole Salter (National Black Theatre), Good Grief by Ngozi Anyanwu (Vineyard Theatre and Audible) and The Homecoming Queen by Ngozi Anyanwu (Atlantic Theater Company). Regionally she has directed The Bluest Eye (Huntington), Pipeline (Studio Theatre), Paradise Blue (Long Wharf), Everybody Black (Actors Theatre of Louisville), School Girls (Berkeley Rep), Jazz (Marin Theatre Company). Other projects include concert performances for independent artists as well as for the NBA, Ndebele Funeral (59E59, Edinburgh, South African Tour), “Black Picture Show” (Artists Space/Metrograph), and Bluebird Memories (Audible). Awoye is a Creative Arts Consultant for Awoye is a Creative Arts Consultant for the African American Policy Forum and the Founding Producer of CLASSIX, theclassix.org.

As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Rinaldo Walcott has published in a wide range of venues on culture, art and policy. In 2021, Walcott published The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition, which was nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award, longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year, and was listed in CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021. He is also author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada, Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies, and co-author of Black Life: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom. He has edited or co-edited multiple works including Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo where he holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the novel, Ours (Viking 2024), full-length collections Mutiny and Thief in the Interior. Williams is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Lambda Literary award, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at NYU and the Randolph College low residency MFA.

Additional information

Weight 48 oz
Dimensions 8 × 6 × 1.5 in