Thursday, April 21st at 4pm: Join us for a conversation between Professor Timothy Yu and Edgar Garcia on diasporic politics and thought in modern and contemporary poetry. We will host two short talks with Q&A to follow.

Timothy Yu is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has written about Asian identity in modern and contemporary English-language poetry, especially of the avant-garde. His most recent book, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (2021) shows how English-language poets in Asian diasporas use “strategies of adaptation” that break free from our models of race, diaspora, and poetics. He has also published a book of poems, 1000 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, 2016), which unsettles the orientalism of white modernist U.S. poetry.

Edgar Garcia is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on literary production in the twentieth and twenty first century Americas. Focusing on indigenous, Chicanx, and latinx studies, Garcia studies how race and national identity is configured through aesthetics and semiotics. His 2020 monograph, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) explores the ongoing vitality of such sign systems considered “dead.” An article portion of this book (“Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich” in PMLA) was honored for the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association. His upcoming book project, “Migrant Lots,” explores the relationship of divination and migration as modes of risk analysis.