Poet Makalani Bandele Speaking on Sept. 29

Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 5 p.m. artist Makalani Bandele will present “(Not Just) Knee Deep Ekphrasis: Investigating the Intersection of Musical, Visual, and Poetic Languages for the Cause.”

During his presentation, Bandele will present and discuss his poems and mixed media work that subvert and critique race, gender/sexuality, and class at the intersections of Visual Studies, Jazz, and Poetry. Students will explore ekphrasis as a process, examine bandele's approach to photography, music production, and poetics, and finally consider different critical issues facing modern society and how different social groups address them.

You can register for the talk here.

Makalani Bandele is a resident of Lexington, KY. He is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem fellow. He has also received fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a BA in the Program of Liberal Studies, as well as a graduate of Shaw University with a Master of Divinity in Biblical Studies. He currently attends the University of Kentucky in pursuit of an MFA in Creative Writing. His work has been published in several anthologies, and widely in print and online journals, African-American Review, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and Sou’wester to name a few. Most recently work from his manuscript, under the aegis of a winged mind, which won the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and is slated to be published in September 2020, appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Foundry, 32poems, and North American Review. His collection of poems hellfightin’, his only other full-length work, was published by Aquarius Press in 2011.