TFBWL presents Wayward Sentences led by Kameelah Janan Rasheed

The Free Black Women's Library
presents
Wayward Sentences
led by
Kameela Janan Rasheed of The Little Octopus School
Saturday, February 14
3PM - 4.30PM

Wayward Sentences explores writing constraints as a method to generate more feral and intuitive writing. In this course, we will explore the erotics of constraint – or the pleasure of having something withheld – a letter, a syntax, a structure, a line of code. Participants will consider Saidiya Hartman's articulation of waywardness in relation to disobedient written language practices. We will explore the work of experimental poets and writers to construct our own writing and scores for others.

Artist's Bio:
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and a death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان) evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward. Accordingly, she explores the politics and poetics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual language. A "language person" (Paul Soulellis), she "gives language a body" (Chang Yuchen) through her large-scale installations, multichannel video works, publications, software, performance, public archives, and learning platforms.

She has received awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022), and has had exhibitions worldwide. Rasheed is a full-time critic at Yale University’s School of Art and the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at CalArts. Through KJR Studios, she founded The Little Octopus School and Orange Tangent Study, initiatives centered on collaborative learning and institutional experimentation.

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