3:15 pm | Guilford Parlor | 11112 Bellflower Road
This event celebrates Julie Ezelle Patton, the 2025 Great Lakes African American Writers Conference Alice Dunbar Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award Winner.
Patton is author of The Flower Poem (Tender Buttons, 2024), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and “Car Tune” & Not So Bella Donna (Belladonna*, 2003). A 2024 special issue of Chicago Review is devoted to their poetic, performative, and visual work and building maintenance project. Patton’s work has been published in About Place Journal and the anthologies nocturnes, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Henry Holt, 1994), Eco Language Reader (Nightboat Books, 2010), and Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (The MIT Press, 2024). Patton has received a 2012 Doan Brook Association Watershed Hero Award, a Cleveland Arts Prize, a Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program Residency, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
Patton’s multidisciplinary installation, Womb Room Tomb, interfaces with the visual art of Virgie Ezelle Patton (with Theresa Ramey) and was part of the 2018 FRONT Triennial. Patton also creates in-the-moment compositions with a typewriter and nonconventional instruments, and has performed at Arts for Art, the Stone, Artists Space, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and other noted venues.
This event is co-sponsored with the Department of English and Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (GLAAWC).