Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and will teach at Sarah Lawrence College and St. Joseph’s College.

His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021.

As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.

Tim Earley is the author of five collections of poems, including Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (Horse Less Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, and Linthead Stomp (Horse Less Press, 2016). He is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade, Scotland. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, jubilat, the Ecopoetry Anthology, and the Hick Poetics Anthology (edited by Abraham Smith and Shelly Taylor). He is the lead designer of the forthcoming tabletop role-playing game, Holler, an Appalachian dark fantasy that focuses on regional folklore, labor conflict, ecological collapse, and demonic infestation.

This event was made possible by generous contributions from the KCAI campus gallery and the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute.