&: experiments in collaborative composition
These poems strive for a kind of lyric ventriloquism of historical events, humans, visual art, and the natural world, serving as both memorialization and counter-memory. Writing with and alongside real and imagined landscapes and interiors, my creative practice holds in tension discomfiting intimacy and respectful distance. It is always collaborative in that the medium is the hinge, or valve, between the self and the words that spill and are shaped upon the page.
Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color, and the poetry collections Vixen and Grimoire. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have also appeared on The Slowdown, and in Ecotone, The Rumpus, The New York Times Magazine, Terrain.org, Water~Stone Review, Prairie Schooner, ISLE, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English at Pomona College.