Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book.Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph’s College. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

A collection of essays by poet Ralph Angel, a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent, that reflects on his upbringing, his relationship to language, and the poetry and art that have been his greatest influences.“I speak the word I because I am not anyone or anything else. I am my strangeness, my presence. And by acknowledging it thus, by naming it, I am intending, hoping, I am going elsewhere, toward what I am not.”Drawn from his reflections on being a distinguished translator of Federico García Lorca as well as the lectures he delivered while a longstanding member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, these essays smash conventional truths about writing by showing us that fragmentation has a symmetry of its own and demonstrating that the distinction between poetry and prose is, to say the least, superfluous.Including a foreword by David St. John, these are essays that reveal that Angel was as close and as engaged an observer of artworks of all kinds as he was the world that formed his poems.

Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book.Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph’s College. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

A collection of essays by poet Ralph Angel, a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent, that reflects on his upbringing, his relationship to language, and the poetry and art that have been his greatest influences.“I speak the word I because I am not anyone or anything else. I am my strangeness, my presence. And by acknowledging it thus, by naming it, I am intending, hoping, I am going elsewhere, toward what I am not.”Drawn from his reflections on being a distinguished translator of Federico García Lorca as well as the lectures he delivered while a longstanding member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, these essays smash conventional truths about writing by showing us that fragmentation has a symmetry of its own and demonstrating that the distinction between poetry and prose is, to say the least, superfluous.Including a foreword by David St. John, these are essays that reveal that Angel was as close and as engaged an observer of artworks of all kinds as he was the world that formed his poems.