Callaloo and Creative Writing*
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Hi and welcome to the panel Callaloo and Creative Writing. In 1997, Dr. Rowell formed the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. The workshop was first mounted at HBCUs like Morehouse, Spelman, Fisk, and Xavier, but soon moved to the journal’s then home of the University of Virginia before launching back into the world again far into our diaspora. The journal currently holds sessions in poetry and fiction at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, Brown University, and of course here at Oxford, attracting students from all over the world. I actually had a student from China last time. Dr. Rowell once called the launching of the journal itself a response to what he called arresting circumstances throughout the African Diaspora. And I’m going to submit to you the need for the workshops is as pressing as ever, particularly given that we just returned to something we thought was in our past. If you are at least as old as I am, and you have been following politics as long as I have, and when you heard Jeff Sessions rumbling through, you realized this is a man who couldn’t even be confirmed as a federal judge. So we have fallen through some wormhole of time and the pervasive fear among many Black folks is of course that we have furthered the fall than we even immediately know. But cultures survive the attempt to exterminate them, they always do. We survive genocidal attempts through the art and the culture that both precedes and succeeds us. And it is always critical to apprentice our young artists to extend this deep bright line of blackness and I for one am so grateful that the institution of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop exists to you. So I will introduce to you our fun panelists.
Vievee Francis is the author of Horse in the Dark, which won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, and Blue-Tail Fly. Her third book, Forest Primeval, was published in 2015. She has also been the Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan and in 2009, she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at Dartmouth College.
John McCluskey’s first novel is Look What They Done to My Song followed by Mr. America’s Last Season Blues, his second novel. McCluskey has also edited three volumes of essays on African American historical figures as well as the collected stories of Rudolph [End Page 162] Fisher. He is former head of the African American African Diaspora Studies department and Professor Emeritus at Indiana University.
Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem, winner of the Honickman First Book Prize, and Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Pardlo’s poems, reviews, and translations have been widely published and translated. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.
Stacy Parker Le Melle is the author of the memoir Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House. She has written political and social commentary for the Huffington Post and served as the primary contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath. She served as communications director for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and curates the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem.
Sebastian Matthews is author of the poetry collections Miracle Day and Midlife Songs and the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps. He is co-editor of Search Party: The Collected Poems of William Matthews and New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews and he is a trustee at the Vermont Studio Center.
Jerriod Avant is a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a former student at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.
I’m going to start this by discussing the Callaloo...
