Shayla Lawz: Dream Space Residency Poems

Be the first to hear new work by a prize-winning poet as she shares poems composed during her two-week residency

In the two weeks leading up to this program, poet Shayla Lawz stayed in one of City of Asylum’s house publications for a writing residency co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP). In this program, Shayla will be sharing work composed during her residency with the public for the first time. The reading will include a conversation with Steffan Triplett, a creative nonfiction writer and the managing director of CAAPP, followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing. 

Founded in 2016, CAAPP is a creative think tank for African American and African diasporic poetries and poetics. Their mission is to highlight, promote, and share the work of African American and African diasporic poets and to pollinate cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration. They are a space for innovative collaboration between writers, scholars, and other artists thinking through poetics as a unique and contemporary movement. CAAPP supports individual writers, artists, scholars, and others nationally and at a range of career stages and academic ranks. They also prioritize providing opportunities for poets and artists outside of academia, in the Pittsburgh community and beyond.

About the Author:

Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, and The Hurston/Wright Foundation, where she was the inaugural writer-in-residence. Her writing/hybrid work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, Obsidian, and The Poetry Project, among other publications. She has been a visiting writer at Rutgers University, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Brown University where she received her MFA. Her debut poetry collection “speculation, n.” (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Poetry Foundation, The Slowdown, and NPR’s On The Record. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

About the Moderator:

Steffan Triplett is a Black, queer writer born and raised in southwest Missouri. He is the author of the forthcoming hybrid memoir Bad Forecast (Essay Press, 2024) and the essay chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press). Triplett is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and a Teaching Assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He has received fellowships and support from Outpost, Lambda Literary, Callaloo, and Cave Canem. More of his essays have appeared in Vulture, Longreads, The Iowa Review, and It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press, 2022).

About Your Visit: 

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