Event

Sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program

The Creative Writing Program presents a celebration of Artist in Residence Rachel Zolf's new book, No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke, 2021). In No One's Witness, Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—"No one / bears witness for the / witness"—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing.

Judith Butler says No One's Witness "shows in brilliant and moving ways how language must change to come close to registering the living aftermath of destruction," and John Keene has described the book as "a critical-theoretical intervention and a lyric prose artifact that will appeal not only to theorists and critics, but also to poets, professors, and students."

RACHEL ZOLF has published five books of poetry and six chapbooks, with a Selected Poetry appearing in 2019. Zolf's poetry and essays have been widely published in journals and anthologies worldwide and translated into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Awards include a 2018 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Art videos Zolf has written and/or directed have screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, White Cube Bermondsey, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. They hold an MFA from The New School and a PhD in Philosophy, Art and Social Thought from the European Graduate School. Zolf spent many years organizing writing projects with trans youth, incarcerated people, and other communities, and now serves as Artist in Residence in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.

AIREA D. MATTHEWS' first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores the topics of longing and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship and a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she directs the poetry program.

SOFIA SEARS is a junior at Penn from Los Angeles majoring in creative writing and gender studies. They’ve published poetry, creative nonfiction, and dramatic work in numerous publications & run a queer horror podcast on the side.