Electric Arches: A Selected Bibliography

October 1st, 2017

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances―blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects―hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook―as precious icons. Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant―a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher’s angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up. Eve Ewing will discuss Electric Arches on Sunday 10/8, 3pm at the Co-op.

The Crown Ain't Worth Much, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Blacks, by Gwendolyn Brooks
 
Kindred, by Octavia Butler
 
The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, by Virginia Hamilton
 
The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
 
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde
 
Blood Percussion, by Nate Marshall
 
Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
 
About Eve Ewing: Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist, poet, essayist, visual artist, and educator. Her research is focused on racism, social inequality, and urban policy, and the impact of these forces on American public schools and the lives of young people. She is a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago; in 2018, she will begin as Assistant Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Currently, she is developing a book based on her dissertation, Shuttered Schools in the Black Metropolis: Race, History, and Discourse on Chicago’s South Side, which explores the 2013 public school closures in Chicago and the structural history of race and racism in Chicago's Bronzeville community. Her first collection of poetry, essays, and visual art, Electric Arches, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in Fall 2017. Dr. Ewing's work has been published in many venues, including The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, Union Station, and the anthology The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. She also co-directs Crescendo Literary, a partnership that develops community-engaged arts events and educational resources. Crescendo's projects include the Emerging Poets Incubator and the Chicago Poetry Block Party. Eve is one-half of the writing collective Echo Hotel, alongside Hanif Abdurraqib. She is the current President of the Board of Directors of MassLEAP, a non-profit organization dedicated to building and supporting spaces for positive youth development through spoken word poetry forums throughout Massachusetts. Dr. Ewing is represented by Beotis Creative.
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