The event features the brilliant poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña & poet and translator Rosa Alcalá in an evening of translation, digression, and transformation.

The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics’ (CAAPP) Black Study 2.0 series, “Black is…Black Ain’t” features poet and translator Rosa Alcalá,  transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´, poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet Natalie Diaz, poet Terrance Hayes, poet Ladan Osman, poet-journalist Jacqui Germain, culture writer/scholar Lauren Michele Jackson, filmmaker Tayarisha Poe, writer and performance artist lê thị diễm thúy, poet and visual artist Aldrin Valdez, poet Divya Victor, and poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña. The series is organized around various themes while all exploring ideas of Blackness’s fugitivity, its runaway state, how it can attach to other bodies who must then take up a disparaged subjectivity, and, too, creativity.

The PCWS brings notable writers to Pitt’s main campus every year. Thanks to funding from the office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences, the series is free and open to the public and features contemporary writers with extraordinary talent in fiction, non-fiction and poetry.