NOPF 2023: Necro-poetics: Practices of Invocation | Writing with the Dead

This panel will feature writers whose work engages practices of invocation and poetic summoning, calling on the dead to be collaborators, whether as a spiritual practice or ego challenge or something in between/else. Panelists will discuss their reasons for writing beyond the self, opening oneself and one’s writing up to inhabitation, animating intertextuality, and reconfiguring theories of influence, then they will read some of their pertinent writing.

0:05 Kristi Maxwell is the author of eight books of poems, including Goners (Green Linden Press, forthcoming 2023), winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize; My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-four, editor’s choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series; and Hush Sessions, editor’s choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville and a 2022-23 American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow.

16:28 Jenna Korsmo is a queer nonfiction writer that braids poetry in prose. She resides in Tucson Arizona with her wife, two children, and all the pets. You can read and see her work on the Longridge Review, Kore Press, Notes from the Mother Field, Female Storytellers, The Splinter Collective and others.

44:20 Melissa Mack is a poet and author of The Next Crystal Text (Timeless, Infinite Light / Nightboat), the chapbook Includes All Strangers (Hooke Press), and poems that have appeared in anthologies such as Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot (English PEN), journals such as The Capilano Review and Elderly, and other ephemera. A long-time resident of Oakland, California, Melissa helped organize community-based spaces of study at the intersection of art, politics, and education, such as the Oakland Summer School and the Bay Area Public School. She now lives in Santa Cruz where she is a PhD student in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.