Keynote Announcement: Katie Farris

aisaak on April 21, 2023

Poet, translator, editor, and fiction writer, Katie Farris creates fluid hybrid forms that seek to carry readers across imaginative thresholds. In 2019’s boygirls, she travels through ancient and modern myths to create waking dreams, while her newest work, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, has been called “luminous” by Carolyn Forche and “real genius” by Kaveh Akbar. A breast cancer survivor, she has written movingly about the often secretive experience of illness and recovery. 

Learn more here: https://www.theshipmanagency.com/katie-farris  

Register now to join us for this talk as well as dozens of other sessions featuring keynotes, artist conversations, roundtable discussions, musical performances, and much more. Conference events will be held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa, which has made a special rate available for festival attendees.

Keynote Announcement: Reginald Dwayne Betts

aisaak on April 19, 2023

Photographed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

A poet, lawyer, and McArthur genius winner, Reginald Dwayne Betts has spent over two decades exploring the world of prison and the effects of incarceration on American society. As the Executive Director of the non-profit Freedom Reads Initiative, he has led the effort to get literature into prisons to help empower people by imagining new possibilities for their lives. His award-winning books include A Question of Freedom, a memoir about his own journey from convicted felon to a Yale-trained lawyer, and Felon, a fierce, agile collection of poems that confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and creates new forms from the redactions of his own court record. At Switchyard, he will perform a solo show based on Felon. 

Learn more here: https://www.dwaynebetts.com/bio  

Register now to join us for this talk as well as dozens of other sessions featuring keynotes, artist conversations, roundtable discussions, musical performances, and much more. Conference events will be held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa, which has made a special rate available for festival attendees.

Keynote Announcement: Natasha Tretheway

aisaak on April 18, 2023

The 19th US Poet Laureate, Natasha Tretheway’s writing explores the intersection of memory, race, and history by mixing investigative rigor with poetic vision. In the Pulitzer-winning Native Guard, she seeks to recover lost histories by imagining the Mississippi’s largely forgotten Black Civil War soldiers alongside the life of her mother, whose mixed-race marriage in the state was illegal in the 1960s. This work then continues in inventive yet often agonizing works like Monument, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Memorial Drive, a memoir about her mother’s tragic murder. She will reveal an entirely new work at Switchyard that brings her distinctive use of history and poetry to bear on Tulsa’s violent past.  

Learn more here: https://natashatrethewey.com/natasha-trethewey-biography/  

Trethewey’s event is presented in collaboration with the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival. It will be held at the Greenwood Cultural Center and is free and open to all.

Register now to join us for this talk as well as dozens of other sessions featuring keynotes, artist conversations, roundtable discussions, musical performances, and much more. Conference events will be held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa, which has made a special rate available for festival attendees.