A Self Portrait is More Honest Than a Selfie: The Poem as Camera
Experience renewal by revisiting a once sacred art form for inspiration. In this generative workshop we will seek to capture the alchemy, mystery, and magic of the old school film developing process by interrogating the history, process, language, and hardware of “ars photographia”—before the digital camera and photoshop.
Regardless of your preferred subject or traditional form, we will utilize the trusted sources of Memory, Research, and Imagination, coupled as always with Empathy as we spend each day thinking, writing, and sharing in a safe space. Using only natural light, participants in the workshop will be challenged to experiment with special filters and lens, interrogate old photos, write original self-portraits and ekphrasis, and discover on the page how much photography and poetry truly have in common.
A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published eleven collections of poetry, including his most recent, Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems, and Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of the 2004 Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, which he adapted for stage, earning him the Paul Green Foundation Playwrights Fellowship Award. His poetry was also dramatized for the 2016 Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV and staged by Message Theater for the 2015 Breeders Cup Festival.
Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets, subsequently publishing the much-celebrated eponymous collection. His honors also include a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, the 2008 and 2009 Denny C. Plattner Award for Outstanding Poetry in Appalachian Heritage, the 2013 West Virginia Humanities Council’s Appalachian Heritage Award, as well as fellowships and residences with Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kentucky Arts Council. The recipient of honorary doctorates from University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Spalding University and Centre College, Walker is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and serves as Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His first children’s book and a third volume of the York saga are both forthcoming in 2022.
Learn more at: www.frankxwalker.com