LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 26, 2025) — Fiction has long offered writers a veil — an opportunity to tell deeply personal stories at a safe distance.
But what happens when that veil is intentionally thin, when the line between fact and imagination is not simply blurred but deliberately twisted?
Please join the Committee on Social Theory for a faculty WIP workshop with Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz and Peter Kalliney as respondent, happening Friday, September 12, from noon to 1:15pm at Bingham Davis House.
“A National Poetics: Frames of Containment” is a draft of the introduction to my monograph manuscript, titled Anational Poetics. The book presents a critical account of post-Civil Rights ethnic minority poetry oriented by different ways of understanding community and proposes the concept of the anational to recognize social practices incompatible with how the nation operates. I use the anational to analyze experimental forms as expressions of minoritarian belonging with political projects that achieve coherence through their own singular histories. The introduction delineates the conceptual and methodological parameters of the project, detailing the structural characteristics of the nation through its historical development, European origins, and entanglement with capitalism. It also explains the nation’s ubiquity as an aesthetic and political phenomenon, noting how the nation form historically occludes the divergent qualities of a vast set of dissimilar collectivities to establish their status as nations.
Frank X Walker is one of the most accomplished writers and poets to come out of Kentucky. Originally from Danville, Walker forged his own path and gained widespread recognition for his poetry, coining the term “Affrilachia” to highlight the importance of African Americans within the Appalachian Region. He would go on to become the Kentucky Poet Laureate in 2013, the first African American to hold the honor. Now, his influence can be heard through the generations of poets to come after him, and his impact on the Kentucky writing scene cannot be understated.
By Francis Von Mann and Avery Schanbacher
LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 28, 2025) -- The first stories Goretti Ntuba ever told weren’t written for an audience. They were scribbled in the pages of a schoolgirl’s diary, reflections on home, school and the everyday rhythms of life in Cameroon.
