Photographer and poet Nadia Alexis will present photographs from her series, What Endures, which she deems “a form of homage to the departed and the living.” Alexis’s photographs of Southern landscapes, paired with a dual presence and absence of the self, are a statement of resistance to the erasure of the Black women lost to violence and whose spaces for mourning have been stolen. Alexis will be in conversation with Zainab Floyd, a current CCCADI Curatorial Fellow in Afro-Caribbean Art and the founder/artistic director of Caribbean Archive, which features Black Caribbean women’s scholarship on agency and resistance. The conversation will be hosted by Grace Aneiza Ali, curator of On Protest and Mourning.
Nadia Alexis is a poet, photographer, educator, and organizer born in Harlem, New York to Haitian immigrants and currently based in Oxford, Mississippi where she is pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Her poetry has been published in Kweli Journal, Indiana Review, MQR: Mixtape, Texas Review, and others. Her photography has been published in Forgotten Lands, MQR: Mixtape, TORCH Journal, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, 2019 honorable mention prize winner of Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award nominee, and 2020 semifinalist of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. She is also a fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole.
Zainab Floyd is a Haitian and Afro-American interdisciplinary artist born and based in New York. Floyd is interested in themes of Black feminism and post-colonialism. Floyd is the founder and artistic director of Caribbean Archive, an archival page of Black Caribbean women who have created a scholarship of work representing agency and resistance. Alongside Angelica Calderon, Floyd also co-founded ZAZA Uptown, an artist collective dedicated to the progress of Afro-Caribbean femmes, women, and GNC artists in uptown New York. Floyd will be an M.A. candidate at Columbia University in the African American studies department with a concentration in Caribbean studies.