Living Writers Series – Spring 2025

Insight, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries

Poet, visual artist, Julie Ezelle-Patton’s most recent title is The Flower Poem (Tender Buttons, 2024). J Walking thru the Alphabet, an edited selection of Patton’s concrete, visual, and textual poetics from the 1970s to the near present, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books, Fall, 2025. The recently released Chicago Review (Vol. 67), ARKiTEXT, focuses on Let It Bee, her “poetic conceit” of transforming a 1913 Rustbelt brownstone into a living archive of work created by Depression-era artists Russell Atkins, Clifton Clay, Virgie Patton, Theresa Ramey and others, whom Patton has advocated for and collected since the mid-aughts, is a unique collaboration featuring housing, assemblages and installations of locally resourced detritus, For the Birds, an edible forest for wildlife, a coal room theater, writing and meditation spaces, herb gardens and a Cat Cafe. Patton’s “in-the-moment” sound and performance work bridging musical and literary collaborations with artists as diverse as instrumentalists Nasheet Waits, Ken Filiano, Melanie Dyer, Janice Lowe, Jay Rodriguez, and others, has captivated audiences at the Stone, Torn Page, Jazz Standard, Arts for Arts, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia, and at a host of international venues. A recipient of an Acker Award, Denniston Hill Residency, a Doan Brook Watershed Hero Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Poetry Award, Patton currently divides her time between New York City & the rest of the US. Her noted Womb Room Tomb Installation was featured in the 2018 Front International Triennial to great acclaim.

About the Living Writers Series
The Living Writers Series (LWS) is a live reading series organized especially for the Creative Writing Program community at UCSC. There is a new series each quarter, and each series features writers with unique voices. The LWS is open to all creative writing students and the public.

Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, the Laurie Sain Endowment, the Humanities Institute, The Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and the Center for Racial Justice.