Black Life: Newsletter Fourteen
Film screening at BAMPFA this Wednesday, plus more dispatches from the road
Welcome back to Black Life,
We’re thrilled to present a film screening this Wednesday from Claudrena N. Harold and Kevin Jerome Everson at BAMPFA’s theater. Black Life co-curator Ryanaustin Dennis will introduce the film which is a part of UVA’s ongoing Black Fire Film series. More information below on the screening and a dispatch from Atlanta.
Black Life Presents: Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s UVA Black Fire Films
Nov. 10 7PM
A synthesis of Claudrena N. Harold’s rigorous historical research and Kevin Jerome Everson’s refined, materialist image making, the ongoing UVA Black Fire films series employs a radical, nonnarrative approach to represent the legacy of Black achievement and everyday life at the University of Virginia (UVA). Engaging students as filmmaking collaborators grounds the project within the pedagogical process, which combines historical investigation with questions of cinematic form. Each film is distinct in terms of style, and the attention to specific details, language, and gesture helps to fill the gaps in UVA’s historical record while evoking the experiences of Black students and faculty on college campuses across the country.
Black Life Dispatch: For Keeps Books
For Keeps Books is an Atlanta-based community bookstore and reading room. Founder Rosa Duffy on For Keeps Books:
“When I first opened For Keeps, it had a lot to do with the things that I found super interesting and the things that I felt were missing from the general Black space. I felt like I was looking more towards my own practice, like art books and art curators that came out with their own sets of books pre-2000s, so I could find other artists that I had never heard of. Then it shifted because before I opened [For Keeps], I was moving into the different publishers and who was really publishing these young Black poets or writers before they were ultra popular and before they were in this space. Who were the people that they were spending time with? Who was in their cohort? Who never got the, I guess, shine that they deserved? So it started getting into that space, different publishers, Broadside, the different spaces like the Lower East Side or Detroit or Auburn Ave. As of recently, it's been a lot of Lotus Press, a lot of these queer writers that were never mentioned back in the day. —Interview here
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE # 12 JUST BE GOOD TO ME
1. The S.O.S Band - Just Be Good To Me
2. Shanice - It’s For You
3. An Interview with Edna Lewis