Into Archives—Across Genres is a reading/performance series featuring poets, critics, memoirists, activists, visual artists, essayists, short story writers, and novelists who mine various archives to investigate race, gender, sexuality, and class. Writing across multiple disciplines – whether via the epistle, film & photo essay, poem, story, collage or hybrid text – these authors mine history and present day experience, exploring and complicating the possibilities and features of genre in their art.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007); co-editor/founder of The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of the anthology, War Diaries, a collection of writings on Black gay male desire and survival in the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She recently participated in a conference, “Emergent Communities,” hosted by the Poetics & Politics research cluster at UCSC, a reading tour with The Dark Room Collective, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of their founding of a nationally-renown, self-funded African diasporic reading series and arts exhibition, and has just completed research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, NY, for her novel, The Curator. Ms. Bryant is faculty in the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Co-Sponsored by Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund; Poets & Writers through the grant from the James Irvine Foundation; Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center; Literature Department and the Creative Writing Program; UC Presidential Chair Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies; Music Department; Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment; The Ethnic Resource Centers and the African American Resource & Cultural Center; Institute for Humanities Research