Bhanu Kapil has written four full-length cross-genre works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books). Recent classes at Naropa have engaged architecture, somatics, biology and memory as ways to approach or navigate contemporary narrative and poetics. An on-going experimental pedagogy and reflection can be found at her blog: “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor.]”

Sesshu Foster has taught writing in East Los Angeles for 20 years in addition to teaching at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Atomik Aztex; World Ball Notebook; American Loneliness: Selected Poems; and City Terrace Field Manual, a finalist for the PEN Center West Poetry Prize. He also co-edited Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry.

Poetry and Politics is a research cluster of the Institute for Humanities Research, which has provided staff support for this event. Sponsored by the UC Humanities Network. Cosponsored by UCSC Porter College Hitchcock Poetry Fund the Center for Cultural Studies, and the Literature Department.

Please contact Andrea Quaid (aquaid@ucsc.edu) or Juliana Leslie (julianaleslie@gmail.com) with any questions.