Reading by Jessica Q. Stark: Buffalo Girl

Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women’s bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam, beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes—lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother’s photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives.

“There was a consistent feeling of delight and surprise as I moved through the social and mythological world of blood, verbs, and ‘stories better left unsaid’ that Stark makes and un-makes. What a brilliant writer. What a lovely and strange book.” — Bhanu Kapil, author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

Jessica Q. Stark is the author of two full-length poetry manuscripts, as well as four poetry chapbooks, including her most recent, Render (2022). Stark’s first poetry manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for the Double Take Grand Prize in 2016, and her full length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, was named one of the “Best Books of 2020”in The Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. Her poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Pleiades, Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Daily, The Southeast Review, Verse Daily, and Tupelo Quarterly. Stark is a California-native, mixed race Vietnamese American poet, editor, and educator who lives in Jacksonville, Florida. She currently serves as a Poetry Editor for AGNI and the Hybrid Editor for Honey Literary.

Jessica Q. Stark will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions.

This is a free online event streamed via Zoom.