&Now 2019 Conference

For our presentation, we bring RAD! Residencies, a critical-creative literary event most often hosted in Los Angeles, to &NOW. In the spirit of alternative artistic and knowledge making practices, we bring together three points of convergence: poetics, curation, and literary community building. These points - in motion, as sparks carrying forth, gathering, dynamic in their transforming energy, porous to interruption, asides and unpredictable happenings - offer ways to embody collaborative making as an ethos toward imagining a different world and how we might act together in it.

We will highlight and amplify the interconnections between writers that organically arose through the writers’ residencies and their chosen themes. They chose themes that they wanted to think about publicly with attendees, interlocutors who also actively responded and wrote and shared at these events. Residents’ return to their themes and ask us to consider poetry’s responsibility to address the past harms lived into our present time, ecological crisis and living with symbiotic nonhuman others, histories of colonialism conjured along the Los Angeles River, and poetics as a way to create collective cognitive changes that may help us to respond meaningfully and urgently to our shared social-political emergency.

Our panel will begin with a curatorial statement, followed by readings, conversation, and a full-room collaborative activity that we hope will expand our intentional literary community building into even more activated, energized, inviting &NOW points.