After a week in the Dream Space residency, poets and performers r. erica doyle, francine j. harris, Douglas Kearney, and Ronaldo Wilson presented short new works celebrating and honoring Thaddeus Mosley's long career in sculpture. Thaddeus Mosley was honored with the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Professional Achievement Award.
Thaddeus Mosley
The renowned Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950. He entered his first juried show, at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, in 1959. In a career spanning six decades, Mosley’s sculptures have been displayed at the Carnegie Museum, the Mattress Factory, the Cue Art Foundation Gallery in New York City, the Akron (Ohio) Museum of Art, the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, among others. In Pittsburgh, his best-known sculptures are the 14-foot cedar Phoenix at the corner of Centre Avenue and Dinwiddie in the Hill District and the Mountaintoplimestone at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, also in the Hill District. Mosley’s awards include the 1999 Governor’s Award for Artist of the Year in Pennsylvania Visual Arts, and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts’ 1978 Artist of the Year Award, 2000 Cultural Award, and 2002 Guild Council Service to the Arts Award.
r. erica doyle
r. erica doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents. Her debut collection, proxy(Belladonna* Books, 2013), won the 2014 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing. Her poetry and fiction appear in various journals, including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Bloom, From the Fishouse, Blithe House Quarterly, and Sinister Wisdom.
Her articles and reviews have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, and on the Best American Poetry and Futurepoem blogs. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Humanities Council of DC and Poets and Writers, and she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Erica is also a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers.
francine j. harris
francine j. harris is the author of play dead, winner of the 2017 Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards. Her first collection, allegiance, was finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Awards. Originally from Detroit, she has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, is a Cave Canem poet, and is currently Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.
Douglas Kearney
Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says Buck Studies "remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” His third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014), examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. It was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. Cultural critic Greg Tate remarked that Kearney’s second book, National Poetry Series selection The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), “flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity, and book learning.” Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito Press 2016) collects several of his libretti, including one written in a counterfeit Afro-diasporic language. Of Tongues, M. NourbeSe Philip writes, “where liberation meets libretto.... [Demonstrates] the ‘fist of voice of wound.’”
His work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Resisting Arrest (2016), Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (2016), Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (2016), Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), Best American Experimental Writing(2014), What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children, and many others. He is also widely published in magazines and journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Scapegoat, Obsidian, Boundary 2, Jacket2, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, and Indiana Review. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts, where he earned his MFA in Writing (04).
Ronaldo V. Wilson
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man(University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize., Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and Lucy 72(1913 Press, 2017).
Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Dixon Place, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lousiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program.