Healing Futures: Ghosts of the Future

“Mississippi was already worked/into my genes, a nascent veined tick.” – Zakia Henderson-Brown

“these five hundred years in our bones/striated conquistas dragging/the letters of the harrowed tongue/into the geography/of our marrow” – Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Zakia Henderson-Brown and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes explore the lessons of ghosts as guides in our quests for liberation. How do we bear the weight of history when it is rife with the violences of colonialism & enslavement & heteropatriarchy, living stereotypes & borders of belonging, an ever-present need to begin again? henderson-brown and restrepo rhodes invite us to freedom quests, to document our bodies in our own terms, to provoke healing through interaction with our pasts and by summoning futures. We find here: dangers, wildnernesses, mourning, and possibilities fertile in always beginning.

Healing Futures, curated by Purvi Shah, is a series of three readings featuring six writers in collaboration with with six artists. Each event presents the poetry of two writers around the theme of Healing Futures and unveils two new limited edition broadsides. The poet/artist collaboration explores the relationship of text, image, and design, incorporating the artists’ visual conveyance of writers’ poetry and prose in broadside form. This event is hosted by Purvi Shah with readings by Zakia Henderson-Brown and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes. Adama Delphine Fawundu and Matt Collins will discuss their concepts for the broadsides revealed during this event.

zakia’s broadside Bloodline was designed & printed by Adama Delphine Fawundu, and heidi’s broadside Lessons was designed & printed by Matt Collins.

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council