Join us in welcoming three extraordinary poets from Hawaiʻi to ARC’s virtual stage: our own Poetry & the Senses Fellow Noʻu Revilla will read along with D. Kealiʻi MacKenzie
and Donovan Kūhiō Colleps. Poet and reading organizer Craig Santos Perez will join in for a conversation and Q&A. Craig Santos Perez (Chamoru from Guam) is the co-editor of six anthologies and the author of six poetry books and one monograph. He is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and an ARC Poetry & the Senses facilitator for spring 2023.
Noʻu Revilla (she / her / ʻo ia) is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022) won the 2021 National Poetry Series. She is a lifetime student of Haunani-Kay Trask and prioritizes collaboration, movement, and gratitude in her practice.
From Milkweed, “In this debut collection, No‘u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo‘o, ma‘i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red—for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother intended,” and we heed; before her, “we stunned insects dangle.” Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic.”
D. Keali‘i MacKenzie is the author of the chapbook From Hunger to Prayer (Silver Needle Press). A queer poet of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, European, and Chinese descent; his work appears in or is forthcoming from Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures, Qu, Cobra Milk, Foglifter, Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and Prismatica LGBTQ Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. A past member of the Worcester Poetry Slam team, he has performed his poetry at the ʻAha Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi, Worcester Art Museum, and the Wonsolwara Wave Dance held in Madang, Papua New Guinea.
Donovan Kūhiō Colleps is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi poet and editor. His book of docu-poetry, Proposed Additions (Tinfish Press), was published in 2014. His recent work has appeared in Poetry, The Slowdown, Poets.org, and the Norton anthology, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through.
From Tinfish, “Donovan Kūhiō Colleps constructs PROPOSED ADDITIONS out of many parts: a house blueprint; his grandfather’s cancer journal; the instructions to a pulmonary respirator; the story of a daddy sea horse; and an investigation of O’ahu’s leeward side, its histories and its mo’olelo. In this hybrid work—documentary poem, prose reflection, elegy—Colleps recovers his grandfather’s memory by way of the filing cabinet he left behind.”
Presented by the Arts Research Center with the support of
Engaging the Senses Foundation, and co-sponsorship from the
Departments of English and Ethnic Studies, and the Center for Race & Gender
About the Arts Research Center
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is a think tank for the arts. It acts as a hub and a meeting place, a space for reflection where artists, scholars, curators, and civic arts leaders from a variety of disciplines can gather and learn from one another.
ARC advances but also challenges the “cross-disciplinary” ethos in contemporary art practice by bringing innovators in the fields of visual art, public art, dance, theatre, music, architecture, film, creative writing, photography, and social practice into dialogue and debate. Participants share different histories, test perceptions of skill and innovation, and analyze the economic circuits and support systems that constrain and enable cross-disciplinary art practice.
