A Poetry and Artist’s Book Event Featuring Aaron Cohick and Divya Victor

When: Feb. 10, 2022, noon
Where: Online, free and open to the public with registration

Event Description: Divya Victor and Aaron Cohick will speak about their splendid, collaboratively created artist's book, Curb.

Curb focuses on scenes that represent hate-crimes committed against South Asian migrants within a larger context of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. To quote the author, “The poems pursue documentary traditions, favoring an expansive approach to intertextuality, source-to-page relationships, the range of roles available for the voice, and intermedial contact (between text and image).”

The relationship between text and image is vividly displayed in the artist’s book designed and printed by Cohick. A double-accordion book with sewn-in sections, images are rubbings made directly from sidewalks and curbs.

Victor is an accomplished poet and author of CURB (Nightboat Books); Kith, a book of verse, prose memoir, lyric essay and visual objects (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag); Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), Things to Do with Your Mouth (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2.

Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada).

She is currently Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University.

Aaron Cohick is a book artist, publisher, and educator based in Colorado Springs, CO, where he runs the NewLights Press and The Press at Colorado College. Aaron's work, under both imprints, is held in public and private collections all over the world, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Chicago Library, SFMOMA Library, the Letterform Archive, and the Tate Britain Library. He has taught workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, the Bemis School of Art, the San Francisco Center for the Book, Naropa University, and Penland School of Crafts.

Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact agwenzel@uchicago.edu as soon as possible.