Spoken Word Series

JOAN HAWKINS is an associate professor in cinema studies at Indiana University. Her creative writing has appeared in Fevers of the Mind, Sand, and the Performing Arts Journal. Her most recent book publication is William S Burroughs Cutting Up the Century, co-authored with Alex Wermer-Colan. The piece she is reading this evening comes from Rape Escapes, a poetry and prose anthology-in-progress that she is co-editing with K.H. Brower. Rape Escapes is organized around near misses. Assaults that did not happen or that did not happen to the narrator of the story. Assaults that did happen but were survived.

Maria E. Hamilton ABEGUNDE, Ph.D., is a Memory Keeper, poet, ancestral priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition, healing facilitator, and doula. Her research and creative works are grounded in contemplative practices and respectfully approaching the Earth and human bodies as sites of memory, and always with the understanding that memory never dies, is subversive, and can be recovered to transform transgenerational trauma and pain into peace and power. Her most recent works address anti-Black racism and violence, genocide, sexual violence, and healing in the US, Brazil, and Juba, South Sudan, and can be found in If My Body Could Talk (Mouth), North Meridian Review, the Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, FIRE!!!, and Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams. She is the founding director of The Graduate Mentoring Center, and a faculty member in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. In 2021, she was featured in Bloom magazine in the February/March Issue that recognized the accomplishments and contributions of Black Women of Bloomington. Dr. Abegunde is a Cave Canem, Sacatar, Ragdale, and NEH fellow.

K.H. BROWER most often writes science fiction for young people. Her YA SolarPunk series of novels imagines a future world in which her heroines and heroes actively regenerate damaged ecosystems across the galaxy. She is currently pitching a new TV streaming series, also SolarPunk, and is writing a contemporary feature film about a girl who rescues her neighbor’s pet bull, and together they save their forest. Among the Magic Mountains, her half-hour memoir master’s thesis film for USC School of Cinema-Television, has been screened at festivals worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. “Escaping Beaver Trapper” is her return to the memoir form.

VALERIA DeCASTRO is a performance artist, Butoh dancer, and works in non-traditional and contemporary theatre. She studied music at the University of Brasilia (Brazil) and holds an MA in Italian literature with a concentration on Film Studies from the Indiana University. Her work is interdisciplinary and largely influenced by Maura Baiocchi’s innovative methodology of the “Choreographic Theater of Tensions.”