College, Town Community Celebrate 8th Annual Litfest

Continued from page 1 possible score of 80 points. Though rules allowed for the audience to “boo” judges for giving low scores, all performers scored highly and the crowd was very energetic and cheerful. Refreshments including pizza, cookies, and apple cider, were provided for attendees.

There were around 15 performers, including two students who were featured but did not compete. The judges each read a quote from a banned book, then Mikayah Parsons ’24, who was not part of the competition, performed to calibrate the judging. Following that, each performer read one original piece of poetry, prose, or monologue, with a three-minute limit. During the intermission, there was impromptu additional competition where haikus were written and performed based off of interesting prompts like “snack stuck in vending machine” and “not letting scores define you.” Afterward, the second round of the spoken word slam began where students read another original piece.

The first place prize for the Spoken Word Slam was a spot as a guest of honor at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City with travel expenses covered by the college. The second place prize was an iPad. Tristan Moore ’24 placed first, Max Pasakorn ’24 placed second, and Emily Wykoff ’26 placed third.

“God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin”

An exhibit in the Mead Art Museum curated by Hilton Als — art curator; University of California, Berkeley professor of English; and staff writer of The New Yorker — called “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin” opened on Friday night. The reception featured opening remarks by Siddartha Shah, director of the Mead, Jennifer Acker ’00, founder and editor-in-chief of The Common, and Als himself. The exhibit will remain on display through the summer.

The exhibit combines visual art such as short film, sculpture, painting, and photography. It also includes various eclectic artifacts from Baldwin’s life, such as rocks from his terrace in France and first edition copies of books he wrote. One part of the exhibit features a sculpture of Baldwin’s head, and adjacent to it is a photograph of Baldwin face-to-face with the sculpture.

The exhibit is broken into three rooms, and each one highlights a different aspect of Baldwin’s life. The first room is an exploration of Baldwin’s childhood and early adulthood, including photos and depictions of his parents. It also includes his mentors, painter Beauford Delaney and Orilla “Bill” Miller. The second room explores his connection to New York City and his queer identity. In his opening remarks, Als said, “It was very important to me to give [Baldwin] back his identity as a gay man.” The third section of the exhibit highlights Baldwin’s lifelong unrealized desire to work in the film industry.

Als remarked, “All of these rooms are about possibilities and each room is about my hope or understanding of where Baldwin came from and what he aspired to do.”

Conversation with Meghan O’Rourke and Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Meghan O’Rourke and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, both National Book Award finalists, discussed their views on writing — from the meaning of truth, to the role of mortality, to the possibility of healing, and more — in Johnson Chapel last Friday evening.

The conversation was moderated by Lecturer in English Dennis Sweeney, and it featured opening remarks by President Michael Elliott, The Common Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker, and National Book Foundation Executive Director Ruth Dickey.

Both authors began by reading passages from their featured books: Contreras from “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” a memoir about her family’s supernatural powers, and O’Rourke from “The Invisible Kingdom,” a personal investigation into the contemporary chronic illness epidemic.

Afterward, Sweeney began to pose questions to the authors, who took turns answering. Despite the superficial differences between their books, the authors’ responses often built on each other.

Both agreed that the act of writing is less about solving problems than it is about finding language to express those problems. “If we try to solve the mystery, … the meaning is lost,” Rojas Contreras said. O’Rourke added that “the work language can do … is in many cases political,” emphasizing that the language used by those who are sick is often discounted by the medical system but is nonetheless an important aspect of their experience.

The authors also talked about the extensive research involved in writing their books. For Rojas Contreras this research was personal, as she was telling a story about her own family. But when she attempted to do archival research she came to a realization: “People like us are not in the record,” she said. Rather, it is more of a “history of colonization.” So she instead focused on having conversations with her family members about their experiences.

O’Rourke said her research was both personal — based on her own diagnosis with an autoimmune illness — and externally focused, as she also spoke to many other people who suffered from similarly under-described conditions. She began to recognize a similar story emerging over and over. “The thing that connects us all is our mortality and our fragility,” she added.

Addressing the possibility of healing via writing, O’Rourke said that the process can be therapeutic, but that isn’t why she writes. She just wanted to find “a container” for what she had experienced. “We need stories in order to live,” she said, quoting Joan Didion. As Rojas Contreras put it, “Sometimes, healing is living with whatever happened to you.”

"Phosphorescence" with Victoria Chang and Tyehimba Jess

The Friendly Reading Room in Frost hosted a poetry reading with Victoria Chang and Tyehimba Jess on Saturday. The reading was a special LitFest edition of a monthly poetry event, “Phosphorescence,” typically held at the Emily Dickinson museum.

Chang kicked off the event with selected poems from her books “Obit,” “Dear Memory,” and “The Trees Witness Everything.” Many of Chang’s poems from “Obit” and “Dear Memory” explore her grief following the death of her parents and the many questions she was left to contemplate after their passing. Chang read aloud, “I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to, like a scent.”

Jess read from his book “Olio,” which explores the lives of Black figures from the 19th century whose legacies have been neglected by history. Several poems are written about John William “Blind” Boone, ragtime composer and musician, whose eyes were surgically removed as a cure for encephalitis when he was an infant. One poem, written from the perspective of Boone as a child imagines a conversation

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