Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula:
An AfroFutures Book Club

Season Two: 2022 - 2023

Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula speculates re: Black gender expansiveness

as the nebulae for Black Progress. It imagines altering timelines

of reality: WE as mystic/spiritual talisman to the past. WE as umbilical cord to our future. WE as SuperMassiveBlackHole

portal to forever.

What happens when we assist in our own Birth?

Thanks to funding from our sponsors, Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula

has been expanded to include guest speakers and interactive

engagement across performance, visual art,

cultural work, and community organizing.

How far can the limits, boundaries, possibilities

of a book club be pushed in order to

activate community?

Our second season will be hosted online and

in-person at Gallery 992.

October/November 2022:

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

Akwaeke Emezi

For the month of October we're reading Akwaeke Emezi's memoir-in-letters,

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. Scroll down to watch a prerecorded marathon reading and a talk-back featuring CultSTATUS Founder, Constance Collier-Mercado, in conversation with poet and sound artist readers Aerik Francis, Jayden McClam, and Chelsea Botts. Then, on November 12th, we'll host an in-person meetup in Southwest Atlanta to discuss the possibilities for our own creative art responses.

Thanks to our sponsors, we are also able to offer one free copy of the book to each registered attendee.

PLEASE NOTE: In order to accommodate covid-19 safety measures,

in-person attendance will be limited to no more than 15 people at each monthly session

and all guests will be required to wear a face mask while inside the venue.

Closed captions are provided for all recordings. If you are in need of digital or physical accommodations due to a disability, including but not limited to communication in an alternate format, please contact our Founder, Constance, at Info@cSArtsHaven.com

Aerik Francis (they/he) is a Queer Black & Latinx poet & teaching artist based in Denver, Colorado, USA. Francis is the author of the chapbook BODYELECTRONIC (April 2022, Trouble Department), and has also recently released an EP of poetry-songs called SYZYGY (available now on bandcamp). They are a Canto Mundo poetry fellow and a The Watering Hole fellow. They are also a poetry reader for Underblong poetry journal and a coordinator with Slam Nuba. Francis has poetry published widely, links of which may be found at linktr.ee/aerik as well as their website phaentompoet.com

______________________

Previous Readings:

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of newly released book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others.

As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.

In 2016, Duplan founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.

Sierra King is an Atlanta based Artist, Photographer and Archivist. Her creative and arts administration work is dedicated to documenting, preserving and archiving the work of Black Women Artists. She has had the honor to work on the archival team as the Lead Photo Archivist for the Kathleen Cleaver Papers before it was acquired by Emory University. She is currently building and preserving the archives of Printmaker Jasmine Williams and Director, Ebony Blanding.

Sierra holds a Bachelor's of Arts Degree in Art from Valdosta State University. In 2020, she was awarded the Billops-Hatch Fellowship Award to continue research for Build Your Archive, an interactive assessment plan to help Black Women Artists build their archives in real time. She is also currently the Community Manager for TILA Studios, a visual arts incubator for Black Women Artists.

"This documentation becomes an investigation of the relationship between the artist and the photographer. And even greater than that the Black Woman Artist places trust in my eye to respect her likeness and is able to see herself in me while capturing her.

In my documentation of her work, I am also documenting myself, as an artist and the possibilities of what a Black Woman Artist can look like for others to find far after we have gone and the work has been made."

- Sierra King

Funding for this program is provided by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.

Financial support provided by Alternate Roots (in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).

| Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula: Season One

| Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula: Syllabus

| CultSTATUS Home

(c) 2022, The CultSTATUS Arts Haven - "Your Inside Ticket to the World of Cultural Arts."

Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula: An AfroFutures Book Club

Season Two: 2022 - 2023

(c) 2022, The CultSTATUS Arts Haven - "Your Inside Ticket to the World of Cultural Arts."

Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula:
An AfroFutures Book Club