Event

sponsored by the Creative Writing Program

Join us for a reading by writer, dancer, archivist, and filmmaker Harmony Holiday, sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and hosted by Laynie Browne. Holiday's most recent work, Maafa, is an epic poem about reparations and the female body; the book takes its title from the Swahili word for catastrophe or holocaust. A description in the Paris Review notes that Maafa "calls on a pantheon of sonic ancestors: Lena Horne, Sun Ra, Al Green, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. They are the points of contact by which a stolen history might be clawed back." As Harmony writes in Maafa: “black  music  is the music of  forensics // all my dead friends come to me as songs.”

HARMONY HOLIDAY is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220arts. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and an exhibition on backstage culture for The Kitchen in New York, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.

For more information, see the Kelly Writers House calendar.