CRUNCH: Platformers - Enabling Contemporary Thought and Practice

Join us for an evening with award winning poets, editors, and platformers Matthew Shenoda, Kwame Dawes and Nadine Monem, and chaired by Amy Kulper. 

To change discourse and thought we not only need to change our practices but the platforms where our practices take place. A platform could be an institution, an edited publication, a series of events, an educational project, a job offer, or the space and geography where each of these take place. In this event we will hear from colleagues who set up platforms that enable and cultivate new practices to come, so that these can easily thrive and not struggle to rise up.

This event is part of the inaugural CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture replacing the International Lecture Series. Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. 

Speaker Biographies

Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica.

Matthew Shenoda is the author of several books, including Tahrir Suite: Poems, winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award; and, most recently, The Way of the Earth. He is the editor, with Kwame Dawes, of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden, and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund. Shenoda is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Nadine Monem teaches across Culture, Criticism and Curation BA, Culture, Criticism and Curation MA and Writing for Change PGCert at Central Saint Martins, University Arts London. She writes narrative non-fiction, theory and memoir that heavily engage with radical archival practices, reaching back in time to feel for new histories and feeling forward for new ways of kinship. Her work has been selected for the 2021 Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest, the Tin House 2021 Summer Workshop and the Catapult Memoir Workshop for Writers of Colour. In 2022 she was named the winner of the Wasafiri Queen Mary University New Writing Prize for my essay, Salt Prints. Nadine has also worked as an arts editor and publisher for over fifteen years.

More information

Image: Romare Bearden, 'Young Students' 1964