The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies welcomes visiting artist Gabrielle Civil!
Civil will read from her most recent work of performance prose, "the déjà vu," published by Coffee House Press. After the reading, she will be joined by the writer Janice Lee for a conversation about writing.
Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty performance works around the world including Jupiter (2021) at the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival and Vigil (2021) in Northern Spark. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), ( ghost gestures ) (2021), the déjà vu (2022), and In & Out of Place (2022). Her writing has also appeared in Black in the Middle, Teaching Black, New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. She earned her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, traveled as a Fulbright Fellow to Mexico, and was named a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Los Angeles Emerging Artist. She teaches creative writing, black feminism, and performance at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, most recently: Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022).