Eve Ewing Electric
Arches
5:30 pm American Writer’s Museum 180 N. Michigan 2nd
floor
Eve Ewing will be in discussing her
first book, Electric Arches, with fellow poet José Olivarez.
Electric Arches is an imaginative
exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and
narrative prose. Original meditations
on race, gender, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up, from a
distinctive new voice.
Blending stark realism with the surreal and
fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago
to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and
reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances—blues legend
Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters
his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects—hair moisturizer, a spiral
notebook—as precious icons.
Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant—a
cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls
are saying; a teacher’s angry, subversive message scrawled on the
chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh
conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of
growing up.
Eve L. Ewing is
a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared
in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic,
The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She is a
sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service
Administration.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, the
co-author of Home Court, and the
co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. A winner of fellowships from
Poets House, The Bronx Council on the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, & The
Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poets, The Chicago
Tribune, The Adroit Journal, & Hyperallergic, among other places. His book,
Citizen Illegal, is forthcoming from
Haymarket Books. He is from Calumet City, IL, and lives in Chicago.
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