Dose of Poetry: Missing/Missed – An Arts and Advocacy Event

Inspired by the journalism of Erika Marie Rivers, Our Black Girls, and Derrica and Natalie Wilson, producers of the HBO docuseries Black and Missing, Missed is a piece of participatory action research dedicated to the countless women (and their families) who go missing each year. Police reports reduce the missing person to “the last thing she was seen wearing”; somehow, in the moment of going missing, the person becomes a stereotype, label, profile that can be stapled on telephone poles: absent and obsolete. According to the National Crime Information Center, 268,884 women are reported missing each year. We turn to social media and popular culture to see which stories receive airtime, exposure, and thus, attention, and which faces do not. Please, join us on April 18th in the SMJC Library. The art project will include applying redaction to missing ads and newspaper articles to create a series of erasure poems—to find the person missing from the text and make visible the person behind the text. In this excavation of voices, writers play the role of grief doula and critical witness, but, also, peace medium and generous listener. The limits of the work are unbearable: not being able to bring the body of the person back. The reach of the work offers promise: how can we bring the essence of a person home?