Every other Thursday | GCCR Lounge | 7 – 8:30 pm | $95
GCCR announces the second installment of Reading and Writing LGBT Lives, our ongoing series of writing workshops. This course, set to meet every other Thursday began February 2nd, and showcases the work of two Black artists whose unique insights and sensibilities have expanded the boundaries of our common humanity. The course is taught by Randy Marshall. (Late starters are welcome to join.)
Randall Kenan is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. Raised in a rural community in North Carolina, Kenan has focused his fiction on what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States.
His stories, at once uplifting and troubling, explore the grey areas where individual passion and personal history get tangled up in the grape-vine of a made-up town, in its gossip and its gospel. But the love and loneliness and longing for redemption that Kenan’s characters share are as real as it gets.
Audre Lorde, self-styled “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” dedicated her life and her talent to confronting the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her writing, as Joan Martin notes in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, “rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling.” Lorde resisted modern society’s tendency to categorize groups of people and fought the marginalization of such categories as “lesbian” and “black woman,” thereby empowering her readers to react to the prejudice in their own lives.
Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde on February 18, 1934, this Caribbean-American essayist, poet, and activist was published very regularly during the 1960s—in Langston Hughes’ 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender and even health—this last was added as she battled cancer in her later years—as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued that, although the gender difference has received all the focus, these other differences are also essential and must be recognized and addressed.
Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy. Six years later she was diagnosed with liver cancer. She wrote The Cancer Journals which, in 1981, won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award. She lost her fourteen year battle with the disease on November 17, 1992. Her outspoken poetry and cultural criticism are her legacy.
The course is taught by Randy Marshall. Marshall earned his BA in Spanish from VCU in 1991 and his MFA in creative writing, also from VCU, in 1997. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Richmond Arts Magazine, GSU Review, Cream City Review, and Blackbird (an online journal of literature and the arts). Marshall co-edited Larry Levis: The Gazer Within, which was published in 2001 by the University of Michigan Press as part of its Poets on Poetry series. Since 1999, he has been a featured contributor to Platform, a broadside published by New Virginia Review to promote Poetic Principles (an ongoing reading/lecture series that has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts). Selections of his poetry were finalists in the Frank O’Hara Award Chapbook Competitions for 2004 and 2005. He lives and works in Richmond and currently serves as a senior editor for Blackbird.
This course will meet 6 times: February 2nd and 16th, March 1st and 15th, and April 5th and 19th from 7:00 – 8:30 pm. Registration is $95. For more information contact jrandymarshall@gmail.com or call Cindy Bray at 804-622-4646 ext. 22.
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