Manuel Gonzales, Yona Harvey, and Gary Jackson; We Wear the Masks: Poetry and Fiction inspired by Comic Books (2017)
This event took place on March 13th 2017 at Folger Theatre.
“Missing You, Metropolis heralds a new voice unafraid to embrace pop culture, and to discover in it a world at once paradoxical, desired, and cruel.”—Rain Taxi Review of Books
PEN/Faulkner Fiction and the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series came together to explore the evolving influence that comic books have on writers. The writers read from their work and participated in a post-reading conversation moderated by Dr. Tara Betts, Visiting Lecturer at University of Illinois-Chicago. Using handwritten poems and passages, the artists of Ink Brick, a micro-press for comic book poetry, created one-of-a-kind comic book broadside for this event.
Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! He teaches creative writing for the University of Kentucky and the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Yona Harvey is the author of Hemming the Water, which won the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and is a co-author of the Marvel Comics series Black Panther: World of Wakanda.
Gary Jackson is the author of Missing You, Metropolis which was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He is an assistant professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.