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This talk illuminates the afterlives of Essex Hemphill’s understudied poetry, performances, and publishing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. Where more widely published and studied AIDS elegies straightforwardly lamented the losses of primarily white men, Hemphill’s poetry worked across genres (lyric, elegy, and documentary) to mourn the dead while also bearing witness to the long and complex histories of racism and homophobia (or what he called “evidence of being”) that made queer Black Americans disproportionately vulnerable to AIDS. These histories, he showed, constituted the real disaster at hand. Making these histories visible also made more room for both defiant and joyful declarations of embodied intimacy, which animated much of his poetic work. He frequently performed this work in a collaborative, choreopoem format with fellow writers, singers, dancers, and activists primarily based in Washington, DC. A devoted anthologist and published author, he also created durable material conditions in which Black queer poetry continues to be performed, published, and
anthologized. Despite the social, political, and physical conditions of mass death that surrounded them, Hemphill and his collaborators thus secured what he called “the blessings of liberty”—both imaginative and concrete—that were necessary for surviving the disaster of AIDS.

Melissa Parrish is Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty in American Studies at Smith College, where she teaches postwar American literature. She is completing a book manuscript, titled Situation Normal: Emergency Poetics and the Rise of the American National Security State, which explores the way poetry reveals and resists the U.S. national security state's prominent role in shaping all state-sponsored emergencies. Her writing on poetry and the politics of crisis has been published in Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Women's Writing, and is forthcoming in the edited volume Plants Beyond Borders.