On Sunday, July 11, 2021, from 3:00-5:00 PM, please join Inlandia Institute for a virtual photography and poetry workshop with Dr. Natalie J. Graham, poet and co-founder of KayJo Creatives. As part of Inlandia’s Blacklandia event series, this workshop will explore the connection between ekphrastic poetry – poetry written in response to art – and the artistic medium of photography.

On Zoom; click here to register: https://tinyurl.com/Poetry-Photography

Dr. Graham will guide participants on a writing journey through a series of writing prompts that consider the visual rhetoric of photographs as a foundation for metaphor, imagery, and story. As we consider the ways that photographs provide us new ways of seeing landscape and persona, we will explore the tanka form. Suggested reading: Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary by Harryette Mullen and Forest of Eyes by Tada Chomako.

Along the roadside, someone has spilled

pink Styrofoam peanuts. They add color

to the grassy green, but I still prefer flowers.

— From Urban Tumbleweed: From a Tanka Diary by Harryette Mullen

Natalie J. Graham, a native of Gainesville, Florida, earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. She completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Fellow. Her first poetry collection, Begin with a Failed Body (University of Georgia Press, 2017), was selected by Kwame Dawes for the 2016 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her poems and articles have been published in San Francisco Chronicle, PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers, Callaloo, Obsidian, New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Transition. She is Chair of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) and Director of the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation.