This event is free and open to the public, but registration is encouraged. Register here. This event takes place at the Auburn Avenue Research Library, 101 Auburn Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30303. Doors open at 6pm. Event begins promptly at 6:30pm.

Charis and the Auburn Avenue Research Library welcome Rachel Eliza Griffiths in conversation with Bettina Judd for a celebration of The Flower Bearers. 

About the author

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships from many organizations, including Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, and other publications. Her debut novel, Promise, was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year.

About the conversation partner

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.

Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally.

Our Partners

The Literature, Media, and Writing Department at Spelman College offers comprehensive training in English-language literary, visual, and rhetorical traditions with a special emphasis on Black women’s contributions to global histories of cultural expression.

The Spelman Archives serves as a site of memory for the college and broader community and seeks to preserve the stories of Black women and Black people across the African Diaspora.

About the venue:
Masks are encouraged but not required.
AARL has a free parking lot accessible via Courtland street. Please park and enter the library to get a guest pass for your dashboard before having a seat in the auditorium.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. Donate via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate.

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. 

By attending our event, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

Join us for a Poetry Reading with Bettina Judd, M. Nzadi Keita, Saretta Morgan & Valerie A. Smith. The reading will be held on Saturday, October 5th at 4:00 PM on the Emory University Poetry Stage in the Decatur Library. Following the reading, authors will proceed to signing tables to autograph books.

Purchase your book from Charis Books via this link, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the festival.

Sharing my work in progress “The Mitochondrial Eve Project” with the African American Studies Students at Princeton University.

Three alumnae of Spelman College, Bettina Judd (‘05) Chantal James (‘07) and Ariana Benson (‘19) read from their recent works. This event will be in person and streamed via Zoom.

Washington, DC stand up!

Come join Bettina Judd at one of her favorite Baltimore spots, Red Emmas. Book talk, discussion, and signing.

Featured local reader for the Annual AWP Cave Canem off site event.

In-Person Registration
Live-stream Registration

Experience Cave Canem’s signature off-site reading featuring a selection of Fellows from around the country.

2023 Walk of the Heroines Annual Lecture at Portland State with Professor Bettina Judd

Virtual Event! 1pm-2:30pm PST

Please join the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies department for the Walk of the Heroines annual lecture. This year's lecture by Professor Judd is titled "Feelin."

Feelin is not feeling. The poet, artist, and scholar Dr. Bettina Judd turns to the creative processes and contributions of Black women artists, writers, and poets to talk about feelin—how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Judd will take a word from African American Vernacular English and a concept from Black women to ask us to think critically about critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feelin. Judd's talk will bring us to how Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human to include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that have no name as of yet. By incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry, Judd will speak to how feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive. 

This event is virtual and will take place 7PM CT (5PM PST, 8PM EST, and 1AM 1/25 GMT)

Book Talk and discussion with the legendary Opal Moore at the historic feminist bookstore, now on Agnes Scott’s campus. The Event is hybrid so click here to register if you aren’t in the Atlanta area!

Lecture: “The Meaning of Rage x The Practice of Love” by Bettina Judd 9:30AM

Poetry Reading 3:00PM

Discussion and book signing at Seattle’s iconic bookstore. Conversation with scholar and colleague Dian Million.

VIRTUAL OPTION AVAILABLE HERE

6:30 EST 23:30 GMT

Join us for the first public event which also celebrates the release of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. There will be a salon style talk with luminary thinkers in Black and Black feminist studies who will join Bettina Judd in discussion: Jessica Marie Johnson, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Izetta Autumn Mobley. #BLACKTERPS

Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.

Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.

ONLINE EVENT

Weds. 4.14 6pm
Telling Stories: Medicine and Institutional Racism
[Register Here]
Speakers: Bettina Judd (Gender, Women and Sexuality, U Washington), Raymond Givens (Internal Medicine, Columbia University)
Respondent: Matthew Sandler (American Studies, Columbia University)
Moderator: Rita Charon (Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics)
Co-sponsor: Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics

 ONLINE EVENT

Please join us next week, Monday March 15 @ 12:30pm for the start of the Medicine, Health, and Representation Speaker Series. Dr. Bettina Judd, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington will be giving a poetry reading from her book, Patient., which draws on historical evidence of 19th-century medical experimentation on Black women, scholarly explorations of the body and the archive, and personal medical history. We hope you will join us for this poetic exploration of issues related to race, gender, and science. Please feel free to distribute widely and encourage your students to attend. Full schedule and flyer below. Please register via Zoom to receive meeting links. 

Medicine, Health, and Representation Speaker Series - Spring 2021 Schedule

Monday, March 15, 2021, 12:30-1:30 PM PST [ZOOM LINK to register]
“Poems from Patient.”
Dr. Bettina Judd
Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art literature and music to develop feminist thought. Judd will be reading selections from her poetry collection, Patient.:

 

“...Patient., is about recovery in many senses: recovery of the subjectivity of several historical figures, through the recovery, reconstitution, and telling of their stories—among them Anarcha Wescott, Betsey Harris, Lucy Zimmerman, Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, who were infamously “patients” or subjects of inspection and “plunder” by, among others, J. Marion Sims, the controversial gynecologist, and P.T. Barnum, showman and circus founder. Sims (and the speculum) and Barnum are the featured antagonists in many of these flawlessly empathetic poems, but an unnamed speaker who adds a contemporary voice to the lyric chorus implicates those in charge of her care during a present-day hospital stay at a teaching hospital—suggesting the linkage of modern medical treatment to the traumas vulnerable Black women, enslaved and not, suffered at the hands of unethical scientists and physicians in earlier eras. In the collection’s opening poem, the speaker reckons, “…verdicts come in a bloodline” and she determines “to recover” from “an ordeal with medicine” by “learn[ing] why ghosts come to me.”  She ends her testimony by asking, “Why am I patient?”  (Read that line in however many nuanced ways you want.)  In this profoundly layered witnessing, the subject might be “in the dark ghetto of my body,” or “an idea of metaphors that live where bodies cannot.”  Yet even as Judd vividly evokes the precise brutalities visited upon the Black female body and psyche—letting us see and hear women who “quieted/ broke into many pieces”—these poems also speak of “shedding something, ” “another kind of sloughing.” Ultimately, Patient. enacts a healing and move toward wholeness, recovery of, as one speaker puts it, “spirit [t

ONLINE EVENT

Reading with Derrick Weston Brown, JP Howard, and I.S. Jones for Anastacia Renee

12:30-2:00PM PST / 3:30-5:00PM EST

You can use this link to register for it.

In conjunction with Anastacia-Renée’s solo exhibition (Don’t Be Absurd) Alice in Parts, four of her most beloved poets will read their works in engagement with and in response to her exhibition. This reading will be interspersed with the poets’ reflections on the exhibitions and the ideas that fuel their practices.

FEATURED POETS:

Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA from American University. He is the founding Poet-In-Residence of Busboys and Poets and a graduate of the Cave Canem and VONA workshops. His work has been published in Colorlines and Tidal Basin Review. His first collection of poems Wisdom Teeth was released in 2011 by PM Press. His second collection, On All Fronts, was published by Upper Rubber Boot Press in March 2019. He resides in Mount Rainier, MD.

JP Howard is an educator, literary activist, curator and community builder. Her debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System), was a Lambda Literary finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*) and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom Journal Black Lesbians--We Are the Revolution! JP was a featured author in Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program and was a Split this Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism finalist. JP is featured in the Lesbian Poet Trading Card Series from Headmistress Press and has received fellowships and/or grants from Cave Canem, VONA, Lambda Literary, Astraea and Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). She curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, a NY-based forum offering writers a monthly venue to collaborate. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The Slowdown podcast, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, Anomaly, Apogee Journal, The Feminist Wire, Split this Rock, Muzzle Magazine, and The Best American Poetry Blog. Her poetry is widely anthologized. JP is one of three current general Poetry Editors for Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Editor-At-Large of Mom Egg Review VOX online.

I.S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I. S. hosts a month-long online workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. I.S. coedited The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is a Book Editor with Indolent Books, Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelances for Complex, Earmilk, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review, Honey Literary and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at University of Wisconsin–Madison where she was the Inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship recipient. Her forthcoming chapbook Spells Of My Name was selected by Newfound for the Emerging Poets Series.

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought through affective registers. She is currently Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, The Offing, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. (2014) which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize in 2013.

Explore this collection of recommended reading for the exhibition available for purchase at the Museum Store’s website.

Privacy Statement: The event will be hosted on Zoom, an online platform. If joining by video, your image and/or name may be visible to others. When logging in, you may choose to hide your video, or to rename yourself using a pseudonym, if you would like to protect your privacy. While attendees are encouraged to join from a private location where discussion will not be overheard, confidentiality is not guaranteed. This session may be recorded and used by the Frye Art Museum in its sole discretion.

I will be hosting weekly readings with Auburn Avenue featuring the authors whose work is featured in the special issue on GENDER that I guest edited.

I will be hosting weekly readings with Auburn Avenue featuring the authors whose work is featured in the special issue on GENDER that I guest edited.

A talk for the UW Geographies Colloquium

A symposium hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle on Medical Ethics, Race, Health and Justice. Keynote: Dorothy Roberts.

1.45-3.15 pm Panel 2: Racial, Gender and Class Inequities

Karin Martin, Public Policy The Consequences of Criminal Justice Debt for Health and Beyond

Erika Blacksher, Bioethics and Humanities White Deaths of Despair: The Potential Roles of Whiteness and Racism

Bettina Judd, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies “Questions that Lean Toward the Body, Trip": Black Women’s Healthcare and the Ghosts in the Clinic

(Bettina Judd, Ashaki Jackson, Khadijah Queen) With courts that convict just 2 percent of rapists, calling out predators publicly has become a vital tool in promoting the safety of vulnerable individuals. The members of this panel discuss candidly how they worked to call out prominent sexual predators, offering concrete tools for healing and advocacy. Their bold, ambitious aim: to end victim-shaming and silencing, foster protection of assault and harassment victims, and encourage greater professionalization in literary workplaces.

Curated by Anastacia-Renée With Bettina Judd, Helen K. Thomas and Jourdan Imani Keith

Free

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
-Audre Lorde

Speak to Me! is an intergenerational reading series showcasing poets and writers curated, hosted and moderated by Anastacia-Renee, Seattle Civic Poet (Seattle Office of Arts & Culture). This special installment of the series celebrates the birth, life, and work of Audre Lorde.

The Henry is excited to welcome Mickalene Thomas for a conversation taking place in the galleries of MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête.  In conversation with artist, writer, and performer Dr. Bettina Judd, Thomas will address her work in relation to influential artists and communities of inspiration and will speak to the ways that concepts of beauty, pleasure, and interior space unfold through the photographs.

Mickalene Thomas (lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) makes paintings, collages, photography, video, and installations that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power. Blurring the distinction between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, Thomas constructs complex portraits, landscapes, and interiors in order to examine how identity, gender, and sense-of-self are informed by the ways women (and “feminine” spaces) are represented in art and popular culture. 

Dr. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer whose research focuses on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is currently Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Join Dr. Bettina Judd, Anastacia Renée, and Christa Bell for a morning of collective dialogue inspired by the exhibition, MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête. Designed to be a safe space for an intracommunity conversation among Black women and Black gender non-conforming folks, this will be an outdoor, salon-style gathering. Facilitators will present a family reunion-inspired approach to generate a warm and creatively conducive environment for discussing core themes that emerge in the artwork of Thomas and the tête-à-tête artists, particularly as it relates to the lives of Black women. 

Dr. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focuses on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is currently Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.