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Tisa Bryant explores forms of writing through the literary and visual arts. She is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007; Wave Books, forthcoming), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She has created visual essays on a number of films, including Blade Runner, Under the Cherry Moon, L’Eclisse, and her original film montage on Black women as moral and sexual avatars, “Femme Noire.” In collaboration with writer Ernest Hardy, she presented The Black Book, a visual mixtape and love letter to Black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Her next book, Residual, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is assistant professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and lives in Iowa City.
Photo Credit: Paul Sepuya -
Tisa Bryant, Lynell George, Robin Coste Lewis, and Fred Moten premiere new works of poetry and creative nonfiction under the stars in the Clockshop courtyard:
Ep 31 of “The People” podcast with Douglas Kearney & Tisa Bryant:
Tisa Bryant on panel “Radio Imagination: Octavia E. Butler’s Los Angeles”:
CITY LIGHTS LIVE! with Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant:
Boog City Festival - Race and Poetry: Integrating the Experimental at Unnameable Books: -
Reviews
For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheral African-American characters in film and other media—characters who seem to be there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid or François Ozon's 8 Femmes—but end up loaded with multiple, conflicting meanings.
Publishers Weekly
Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.
San Francisco Bay Guardian
