117 S. Pineapple Avenue
Sarasota
FL 34236
“Hermitage Poet’s Corner: The Contemporary Word”
with Hermitage Fellows DaMaris B. Hill and Kirya Traber
Presented in partnership with Bookstore1
DaMaris B. Hill’s Hermitage Residency generously sponsored by Jane and Bill Knapp.
Kirya Traber’s Hermitage Residency generously sponsored by Charlotte and Charles Perret.
Friday, May 20 at 5pm
Bookstore1 (entrance at 117 S. Pineapple Avenue, Sarasota, FL 34236)
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
Two incredible writers and Hermitage Fellows come together to read and discuss their evocative work. DaMaris B. Hill shares selections from her critically acclaimed Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, a Netgalley “Must-Read Books by Black Authors” in 2022. Playwright, performer, and award-winning poet Kirya Traber shares selections from her previous works and teases her forthcoming novel. Join these two writers, both deeply engaged with our contemporary moment, for a discussion following their readings.
DaMaris B. Hill is the author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland (2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry), The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, Vi-zə-bəl Teks-chərs (Visible Textures). Hill is inspired by the anxieties of our contemporary existence, complicated by fears that certain linear narratives of history fail to be inclusive. “I belong to a generation of people who do not fear death, but are afraid that we may be forgotten,” she states. Driven by a keen interest in the work of Toni Morrison and theories regarding ‘rememory’ as a philosophy and aesthetic practice, Hill uses digital material and critical fabulation research methods to write about “America” and geographic place. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. Hill is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. damarishill.com
Hermitage Fellow Kirya Traber is a nationally awarded writer, performer, and cultural worker. Originally from Northern California, she now resides in Brooklyn. She is a collaborating artist with Ping Chong + Company and is Curator-in-Residence with Hi-ARTS. She was New York Stage and Film’s 2020 Founders Award recipient. From 2015-2020, she was Lincoln Center’s lead Community Artist in Residence. She is the recipient of a NY Emmy Nomination (First Person, PBS), Robert Redford’s Sundance Foundation award for Activism in the Arts, a California Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and an Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award for Poetry. She has been commissioned by notable New York arts institutions such as the New York Philharmonic, Morgan Library & Museum, Orchestra of St Luke’s, and La Mama, among others. Throughout her ambitious performance and writing career, Traber has continuously utilized her art for social change as a cultural organizer. KiryaTraber.com