The launch of SWOLE by Jerika Marchan, published by Futurepoem. Marchan will be joined by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Adjua Greaves for an evening of readings to celebrate the release.
"You can’t graph grief, hope, trauma, or what it took to survive. But you can collect them in poetry, the way Jerika Marchan does in her debut collection, SWOLE, an experimental, sprawling collage of poems drawn from her childhood experience of Hurricane Katrina. The scope of recovery from disaster is usually zoomed out, on the depersonalized plane of cities. Marchan’s eye is a roving one, taking in the whole stretch of New Orleans on an intimate level—it’s people, it’s music, it’s idiom, and it’s bloat.”
— Yasmin Adele Majeed, Ploughshares
Jerika Marchan was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the American South. A graduate of Louisiana State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in New Orleans. SWOLE (Futurepoem, 2018) is her first book.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (NYC, 1980) is an artist concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany and the mediums of scholarship, archival gesture, and language. She is a cocktail waitress, curator of the Monday Night Reading Series at the Poetry Project, Site Director of Wendy's Subway Library in Bushwick, and Young Mother of The Florxal Review. Greaves has been published in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing (Kore Press, 2018), A propósito de nada / Apropos of nothing (Aeromoto + Wendy's Subway, 2017), The Black Earth Institute’s About Place Journal, The Recluse, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in publications from Montez Press, and KAF Collective. In 2017 Belladonna* published her chaplet Close Reading As Forestry. Galleries of her documentary photography and Afrofuturist dioramas are viewable on Instagram via @TerraBot and @SuperModelStudioPractice respectively. She lives and works in New York City where she is studying to be a Master Sommelier.
A writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). She lives in Harlem.
Aug 16th 2018