Bucknell’s Griot Institute for Africana Studies will present Rochelle Spencer, a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer focused on AfroSurrealism, stories by and about people of color, and female empowerment, in a free, public talk entitled “The Black Unfamiliar in the Twenty-First Century: AfroSurrealism” on Wednesday, March 27 at 7 p.m. in the Great Room, Hildreth-Mirza Hall.
Spencer is author of AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction (Routledge, 2019), co-editor, of All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2018), and a co-curator of the Let’s Play exhibition and Oakland’s Digital Literature Garden. Spencer’s work appears in Mosaic, Solstice, Poets and Writers, Callaloo, The African American Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Crab Creek Review (which nominated her for an Editor’s Choice award and a Pushcart Prize), Publishers Weekly, and The New York Times, among others. She currently teaches at San Jose State University and has taught at Spelman College, Georgia Southern University, LaGuardia Community College, Laney College, New York University, and the College of New Rochelle.
The Griot Institute invites the campus community to participate in its spring lecture series, which considers the ways that scholars, artists and practitioners have reconsidered familiar aspects of black culture, intellectual inquiry, and artistic production and have troubled traditional notions of black familiarity. These endeavors range from a reimagining of black theological traditions in terms of secular humanism, demythologizing of the realities of contemporary black immigration and asylum policy, and a rewriting of Confederate histories in light of black experience.
For additional information, contact the Griot Institute at griot@bucknell.edu or 570-577-2123.