Han VanderHart hosts Of Poetry podcast, edits Moist Poetry Journal and reviews at EcoTheo Review, and is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021). Han recently founded the micro poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey.

Han's seminar information:

With Love and Violence: Documentary Poetics and You

“I deeply distrust this tool I work with — language. It is a distrust rooted in certain historical events…and I distrust its order, which hides disorder; its logic hiding the the logic and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational.” —M. NourbeSe Philip

The legal documents that intersperse our lives—birth and death and marriage certificates, applications for school and citizenship, contracts—live alongside our personal documents (journals, letters, photographs, notes). In this seminar workshop, we will explore the special work of documentary poetics—history that only poets can write—and how each of us might contribute to a greater understanding of history, culture, and justice/injustice. From Anne Carson’s fanfold, collaged elegy for her brother, Nox, to M. NourbeSe Philip’s fragmentary historiography of the slave ship Zong!, we will think together about engaging the documents of your life and history. Participants are encouraged to bring a document they would like to engage with them for use in workshop. Instructor will also provide documents for use in exercises.

Evelyn Berry is a transgender author, editor, & educator living in Columbia, SC. Her chapbook Buggery won the 2020 BOOM Chapbook Prize from Bateau Press. Evelyn is the recipient of the Dr. Linda Veldheer Memorial Prize, Emrys Poetry Prize, KAKALAK Poetry Award, and Broad River Prize for Prose, among other honors.