“Migrant Horizons: Poetry and Storytelling in Scenes of Crisis” with poet Edgar Garcia

Join us on Thursday, May 5 at 5:00 pm in Hanes Art Gallery for a poetry reading by Edgar Garcia which will include not only poems but also storytelling to situate those poems: the organizing theme will be crisis, emphasizing not just social, political, and epidemiological crisis but also the creativity and world creation that unfold from critical inflections. The storytelling will examine a few creation stories of the Americas in which migration features prominently, then transition to the world-making of contemporary hemispheric movement even amidst so many scenes of death and devastation. In doing so, it prompts the question of how we engage politically difficult objects of inquiry, and what values we assume.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu(University of Chicago Press, 2020); Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). In 2022-23, he is taking the reins as editor-in-chief of Fence Magazine. He is Associate Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches  and serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the department of Creative Writing.