Reading Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, hosted by Olivia Douglass in collaboration with Passaporta Festival.

[online]

Register Here (tickets via Passaporta Festival - 5 euro) (sold out)

Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.    

Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of “Homie” (Graywolf Press, 2020), "Don’t Call Us Dead" (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and "[insert] boy" (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez has been featured as part of Forbes’ annual 30 Under 30 list and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. They are a member of the Dark Noise Collective and are the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.  

Olivia Douglass is a writer, poet, and curator. Her work has appeared in publications including Bath Magg, Prototype, PUB journal (Sandberg Instituut), in addition to being commissioned by the National Poetry Library. A Barbican Young Poets Alumna, her pamphlet Slow Tongue was published in 2018. She has held residencies with Talawa Theatre Company and Theatre Peckham, to develop her ongoing research project Palm as Portal. Her writing is concerned with articulating alternative visions of liberated Black queer experiences, away from colonial frameworks. Olivia was shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet Prize 2020. She is currently working on her debut collection and is the curator of a forthcoming programme at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA).

No preparatory reading is required. All reading groups will happen online. We will send you the zoom link on the day of the reading group.