Robin Coste Lewis: Intimacy

Robin Coste Lewis is the author Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other recognitions. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, she holds a PhD in Poetry and Visual Studies from the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and many other journals. Lewis, who has taught at Hampshire College, Hunter College, Wheaton College, and the NYU MFA in Paris, is writer-in-residence at the USC. Lewis is the author, most recently, of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry.

Professor Joan Kee teaches in the History of Art at the University of Michigan and is a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at MoMA. Her forthcoming book, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity, engages with Black and Asian artists and the vibrant worlds they initiate through their works and will be released by the University of California Press this April. Kee’s other books include Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019) and Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2014). An occasional public interest lawyer in Detroit, she is an Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail.