Gabeba Baderoon

Voluptuous Silence and Sociality in Poetry

“While my own writing tends to center around silence and solitude, I also operate through vibrant, tender, and reciprocal methods of creating art with others.”

Gabeba Baderoon is a South-African poet, editor, academic, memoirist, and performer. She took her first class in writing poetry at the age of thirty and still describes herself as a student of the writing arts today, a quarter of a century later.

Baderoon is the author of the collections The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela Books, 2005), A hundred silences (Kwela Books, 2006), and The Museum of Ordinary Life (DaimlerChrysler, 2005), as well as the monograph Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Her work has been honored with the University of Johannesburg Prize, the Elisabeth Eybers Poetry Prize, the Daimler Award, and a best book award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Baderoon teaches Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African Studies, and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, where she co-directs the African Feminist Initiative. She has received writing fellowships from the Nordic Africa Institute, Bellagio, the University of Witwatersrand, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. Baderoon has been an Extraordinary Professor of English at Stellenbosch University since 2012, and in 2023 will hold the Sarah Baartman Senior Fellowship in the San and Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town to work on her new manuscript The Concussion Diaries: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind.

As a mentor, she seeks applicants working with poetic language, in any tradition or mode. “I myself work in the lyric poetry tradition, which means I am in a world sensuously alive with the intuitions, whispers, and hesitancies of language, which I press beyond the small circle of the ‘I‘ toward an intimacy with history, theory, and politics,” she says.

“This is not the only approach to poetry, I know. While my own writing tends to center around silence and solitude, I also operate through vibrant, tender, and reciprocal methods of creating art with others.”

Watch Gabeba Baderoon’s video statement:

Nominees

Juliana Sokolová

On Housework

Writer Juliana Sokolová is working on her second book of poems, entitled On Housework, in which she examines the personal and mythological dimension of the slow-burn but ever-present threat of collapse. The poems explore what it is we touch while carrying out housework: a darkness that is prehistoric and always in waiting. In her performance Household Gods, conceived for the Forecast Forum, she will read a cycle of poems from the manuscript. Situated between three languages—Hungarian, Slovak, and English— Sokolová often reflects on language from her position as a writer not working in her mother's tongue, which is Hungarian. Parallel to the book of poems, Sokolová is working on a longform essay reflecting on poetry and the politics of language in the Eastern European context, entitled All the Languages That Have Disappeared From Within Me.

Marcela Huerta

White Horses Always Run Home

Chilean-Canadian writer Marcela Huerta's project proposes an intimate, poetic portrait of the author's mother, Yolanda Huerta, a refugee of the 1973 Chilean coup. The two will participate in somatic practices to find new ways of narrating the histories that have shaped their relationship. They will revisit the geographies of Yolanda's refugee story: Maipú, the neighborhood where she lived before being abducted; Mendoza, the city where she spent her solitary time in hiding; and Winnipeg, the place where she painstakingly built a new life. These trips will inform the subsequent manuscript, portraying not a past trauma but an enduring one that lives forever in the body and in the ways she relates to the world. In unearthing intergenerational trauma and documenting it through a multifaceted process, White Horses Always Run Home aims to create an emotionally cathartic access point for reflecting on how past atrocities shape the struggles of the present, while also creating an empathetic and collaborative poetic experience between a mother and daughter.

Suji Kwock Kim

AND THE PURSUIT OF

Writer and poet Suji Kwock Kim’s project is a full-length mixed-genre manuscript that will expand upon both her first book, Notes From the Divided Country, and her recent chapbook, Notes From the North (Smith/Doorstop, U.K.). In both, she explores the lives of her family and other North Korean migrants in South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. The new work will investigate the fate of the Korean diaspora in these countries, particularly focusing on New Malden, Surrey, which is home to the largest community of North Koreans outside Asia. The manuscript will delve into questions of nation and narration, personal identity and national identity, commemoration and memorialization. It will look at how wars are remembered and forgotten; how the languages of empire and propaganda play in counterpoint with the languages of reportage, resistance, and revolution; how traditional divisions of labor and gender roles are reinscribed or dismantled; how violence is represented; and how cycles of violence can be broken in familial or national history.

Mentee

White Horses Always Run Home

Marcela Huerta

Mentors Edition 8

Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon

Voluptuous Silence and Sociality in Poetry

Greg Fox

Greg Fox

Rhythmic Excavation 

Roee Rosen

Roee Rosen

Troubled Humor and Tainted Beauty

Yuy Tsukahara

Yuya Tsukahara

Post Punk Performance

Irakli Rusadze

Irakli Rusadze

Sartorial Identities

Mila Teshaieva

From Questions to Images