RTS is excited to welcome our Nov/Dec Small Press Traffic resident, Arisa White!
Cave Canem fellow Arisa White received her MFA from UMass, Amherst, and is the author of Black Pearl, Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, and A Penny Saved. She teaches in the low-residency BFA program at Goddard College and is a lecturer at San Francisco State University. She will be the distinguished visiting writer in residence at Saint Mary’s College of California in Spring 2017. You’re the Most Beautiful Thing that Happened is her newest collection from Augury Books.
During her residency at Real Time and Space, Arisa will be working to develop characters and setting for “She: A Sister Outsider’s Heroine’s Journey.” “She” incorporates poetry, dramatic and lyric writing to create a poetic narrative that weaves myth, cultural history, ecology, and biography to tell a tale of living as a queer, black woman during the Great Recession. Lake Merritt in Oakland serves as the setting for “She,” and as the main character completes the 10 stages of the heroine’s journey, she interrogates the social ecology impacting her ability to mine and integrate the terrains of her own femininity.
Photo credit: Nye Lyn Tho