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Poetic Bodies
Youth SPOKEN WORD POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP 1
With: Dr. Javon Johnson
Date: Saturday, November 6
Time: 10:30am -12:00pm
Location: In person at Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A, 123 South Linn Street. Virtually via Zoom.
Ages: 13-18
Tuition: Free to teens! Registration required to attend
Poetic Bodies Teen Workshop possible in partnership with the Iowa City Public Library.
This workshop uses poetry writing, performance, and our personal narratives to explore how we are connected to larger political, historical, social, and economic systems. We will explore the bodies we are and the bodies we have. In this way, attendees will leave with a richer appreciation for poetry and performance, as well as sharpen their creative and critical skills.
This workshop includes analyzing poetry, writing, feedback, and Q & A.
If You're Age 13-18, REGISTER NOW!
Javon Johnson
A renowned spoken word poet, Javon Johnson is a three-time national poetry slam champion, a four-time national finalist, and has appeared on HBO’sDef Poetry Jam, BET’s Lyric Café, TVOnes Verses & Flow, The Steve Harvey Show, The Arsenio Hall Show, United Shades of America with Kamau Bell on CNN, and co-wrote a documentary titled Crossover, which aired on Showtime, in collaboration with the NBA and Nike.
Javon Johnson is an Assistant Professor and Director of African American & African Diaspora studies and holds an appointment in Gender & Sexuality Studies in the Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a certificate in Gender Studies and Cognate in African American Studies from Northwestern University in 2010. Dr. Johnson’s scholarly interests include performance, blackness, African American literature, black pop culture, slam and spoken word, black feminist theory, black queer theory, masculinity studies, black sexualities, and ethnography.
Dr. Johnson’s first book, Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (Rutgers University Press 2017), unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces and argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His second project, The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape (Northwestern University Press 2018) is a co-edited book that critically creatively explores Chiraq (a name that is an amalgamation of Chicago and Iraq as a way to call to the violence of certain parts of Chicago) as a space and as a term. Additionally, Dr. Johnson has published in Text & Performance Quarterly, Liminalities, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, The Root, Huffington Post, and others.
Having published his first book of poems, Ain't Never Not Been Black (Button 2020), Dr. Johnson is a creative scholar who has mounted exhibitions at the California African American Museum where he managed the History Department.
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