The Literature Department invites you to attend a talk held in conjunction with the search for
a position in African-American Literature (Modernism to Contemporary):

Chris Chen

“An Axiomatic Chorus”: Serial Black Identities and Allegories of Improvisation in Nathaniel Mackey’s
From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.

Christopher Chen is a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. at Berkeley in 2011 and an MFA in poetry writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. His dissertation is a comparative study of contemporary African American and Asian American poetry, which explores how the pervasive use of non-narrative, serial poetic forms registers intra- and interracial conflict and foregrounds the question of racial comparison as both impossible and unavoidable in the post-civil rights era.