The Sound of the Earth Turning: Master Class with kathy wu
This workshop weaves together somatic attention and ecopoetic writing to consider our relationship with planetary space and timescales. We will focus on scores, rituals, and the form of the litany to produce poems and short prose. We will engage in Yoko Ono and CAConrad’s poetic rituals, as well as include sonic practice from Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood to feel through sound, repetition, and the body. Within the context of writing diaspora, we will also hold space for writing place, memory, and migration. I encourage participants to bring a small geologic object (a stone, a container of sand, a piece of jewelry, etc.) if they would like.
About kathy wu
kathy wu is an artist, poet, designer, educator, and translator working across language, computation, books, and sometimes textile. They currently teach at RISD Graphic Design. Their work pulls at fraught histories of science and technology. Their debut book, SHE WILL LAST AS LONG AS STONES (Wendy's Subway Press), was the 2024 Passage Book Prize winner selected by Bhanu Kapil. Their works have been published or anthologized by Tilted House Press, Nat Brut, Fonograf Editions, Nightboat Books. They have been selected for visual art and writing residencies at Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Provincetown Fine Art Works Center, Pao Arts Boston, CultureHub, and Blue Mountain Center. They are learning to move more slowly.
About SHE WILL LAST AS LONG AS STONES
Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.
kathy wu's She Will Last as Long as Stones is the 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Bhanu Kapil.