Poetry Reading & Art Exhibit at Chastain Arts Center on Oct 1 at 2 pm

Color + the Body: New Poems & Creative Conversations by Five Poets - curated and moderated by Poet Opal Moore.

As part of this year’s ELEVATE Atlanta Public Art Festival, there will be a live reading of new poems created in response to the exhibition “Deanna Sirlin: Wavelength.” Join us for the Color + the Body Poetry Reading and Creative Conversation curated and moderated by poet Opal Moore – featuring poets Melba Joyce Boyd, E. Hughes, Andrea Jurjević, Charleen McClure and Sharrif Simmons – on Saturday, October 1 from 2-4 pm at Chastain Arts Center Gallery, 135 Chastain Park Avenue, NW Atlanta, GA 30342. This event is free and open to the public.

Deanna Sirlin is known for her use of saturated color and physical brushstrokes in her paintings. This exhibition was created over the past two and a half years during the pandemic when her focus was on creating these paintings and a collaborative video work with Portuguese filmmaker Nuno Veiga.

Sirlin says of her work, “I have realized that my paintings are about the physicality of my entire body making the mark. A favorite place for me is to be immersed in water. It is like being “in” the color. The process of painting is a physical conversation with my eye and body as they move within the color. My paintings are abstract, but my vocabulary comes from my study of nature and its geometry. My color is influenced by light and by watching and paying attention to light as it moves and changes. The flux and flicker of color engage me.”

Opal Moore is the author of Lot’s Daughters and text collaborator for Children of Middle Passage, a performance artwork with visual artist Arturo Lindsay. More recently she has collaborated with painter Erin Drakeford to produce “Leaving Paradise,” a poem for four paintings, part of the Arts Beacon collaborative.

Moore’s poems and stories live in anthologies and collections. These include Homeplaces: Stories of the South By Women Writers; Honey, Hush! An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future OfAfrican American Poetry. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, the Connecticut Review, Callaloo, the Notre Dame Review, and other journals. New work is forthcoming in Bigger Than Bravery, a “literary gathering” collected by Valerie Boyd. Moore is a Fulbright scholar, Cave Canem fellow, DuPont Scholar and Bellagio fellow. Having retired from teaching, she serves as poetry editor for The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Commentary and fiction editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.

Melba Joyce Boyd is a Detroit poet, filmmaker, biographer, editor and author of nine books of poetry. Her last collection of poems, Death Dance of a Butterfly, received the 2013 Library of Michigan Notable Book Award for Poetry. Her nonfiction book, Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall (2009), won the 2010 Independent Publishers Award, the 2010 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and the ForeWord Book Award for Poetry. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press received a 2004 Honor Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her bio-critical book, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (1994) was widely reviewed and praised by literary critics and historians. She is the author of numerous essays on African American literature and film and is the editor of the African American Life Series at Wayne State University Press. She is a Distinguished University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University.

E. Hughes, A Cave Canem fellow, E. Hughes received their MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Poet Lore, The Offing, Wildness Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Protean Magazine—among others. They have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 92Y Discovery Contest. They were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. Hughes has been a participant in Tin House summer and winter workshops, the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation workshop as well as the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Currently, they are a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University.

Andrea Jurjević is the author of two poetry collections: In Another Country, selected by Roberto Tejada for the 2022 Saturnalia Books Prize, and Small Crimes (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize and the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. Her chapbook Nightcall (Willow Springs Editions, 2021) was selected for the ACME Poem Company Surrealist Poetry Series. Her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse and The New Republic, among others. She is the recipient of a Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Hambidge Fellowship.

Andrea was born and raised in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and teaches in the English department at Georgia State University.

Charleen McClure is a Fulbright scholar. She graduated from Agnes Scott College with a bachelor's in English literature. She has taught ESL as a NYC teaching fellow. Her masters in TESOL is from Hunter College; her MFA is in creative writing-poetry at NYU. She has received fellowships from VONA, Callaloo creative writing workshop, Cave Canem, and the Conversation Lit Festival. In 2020, she was a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation writer’s award. Her work has been published in Kinfolks Quarterly, The Poetry Project, and The Offing.

Sharrif Simmons is a performance artist, author, songwriter, musician, poet and arts educator. His writing career spans three decades. His education as a poet started at U.C.L.A. at the famed Liberation Bookstore on 131st St. & Lenox in Harlem, New York. Founded by his Grand Aunt, Una Mulzac, the bookstore served the Harlem community for over 35 years. Poetry chose him the night he witnessed Sonia Sanchez read at the Schomburg Center for Black Research on 135th St. and Lenox Avenue.

Simmons became a staple of New York's cultural renaissance in the 1990’s. Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Cooler, CBGB's, Brooklyn Moon Cafe, Joe’s Pub and NYC’s Summerstage were some of the venues and stages where he performed his unique form of music and poetry. In 2005 he became a Def Poet on season 5 of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He has toured Europe and the United States playing poetry and music for college campuses, festivals and spoken word conferences.

His first collection of poems, "Fast Cities and Objects That Burn" was published by poet Jessica Care Moore (out of print). His latest collection of poetry, Clearly Spoken, Spoken Clearly, is available on Amazon.

***For more details: info@deannasirlin.com