Brown Bag Biography: When Poetry, Life, and Documents Collid

September 20, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall 410

“Interventions of Experience and Memory: When Poetry, Life, and Documents Collide”

By Amalia Bueno, Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, and No‘u Revilla

In the spring of 2012, Amalia, Donovan, and No‘u enrolled in a graduate seminar on Documentary Poetry, led by Susan M. Schultz. Each poet constructed a chapbook from the language of documents—blueprints, newspaper articles, obituaries, data, journal entries, how-to manuals. Donovan wrote about his grandfather, Amalia wrote about her former job in the correctional system, and No'u wrote about her childhood home in Kahului. Today, as they share their projects and explore the fraught relationships between poetry, memory, “fact, ” and desire, we are invited to experience what Phillip Metres describes as the seething and breathing of multitudes.

Speaker Bios:

Amalia Bueno is a graduate student pursuing a Master's degree in English at UH Mānoa. Her poems and stories have appeared in various journals, literary magazines and anthologies. A publicist and researcher, Amalia's interests include issues of gender, culture, and representation.

Donovan Kūhiō Colleps is a graduate student in UH Mānoa's English department. He has taught creative writing workshops for the Pacific Writer's Connection in various public schools on Oʻahu and was also the editor of Hawaiʻi Review. He is currently working on a collection of documentary poems called Proposed Additions, inspired by documents found in his grandfather's file cabinet.

No'u Revilla is a Ph.D. student in the English program at UH-Mānoa. Her chapbook Say Throne was published by Tinfish Press in 2011, and her poetry will be featured in the upcoming exhibition A Thousand Words and Counting at the Honolulu Museum of Art.


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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