SHANTA LEE GANDER 2/24
Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2,000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body.
"Gander is an audacious mythmaker, inspired by Ovid but also keen to debunk the Eurocentric patriarchy that he represents. In a series of wildly ambitious and formally inventive monologues and character studies, Gander offers a searing threnody for the victims of slavery and the African Diaspora. Yet the book is also a moving and hard-won celebration of the black body: the rituals of mourning give way to empowerment."
—David Wojahn, From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry (Poets On Poetry)
Shanta Lee Gander is the author of Ghettoclaustrophobia: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, the winner of the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize with an honorable mention from the Sheila Margaret Motton prize, and reviews featured in the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, Seven Days, and the Kenyon Review. Black Metamorphoses is Gander’s second full length poetry collection inspired by her lifelong love of mythology, has been longlisted for the 2021 Idaho poetry prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson prize. When Gander is not writing poetry, she is working on her memoir project, is producing and reporting her series, “Seeing...:” for Vermont Public Radio, and tending to her photography projects. She has an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Trinity College, an M.B.A. from the University of Hartford, and her M.F.A. in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She teaches Media Studies at The Putney School and enjoys anything that allows her to explore beneath the surface (especially breaking into abandoned places). To see her visual art or read more of her work, visit: Shantaleegander.com.
This event is free and open to the public.