Virgil Kills
*Author cofounded the performance-based Black Took Collective: a group of Black post-theorists who perform and write in hybrid experimental forms, embracing radical poetics and cutting-edge critical theory about race, gender, and sexuality.
*Book is of interest to scholars, readers, and students of twentieth-Century and Contemporary African American Poetry and Poetics, Queer Theory, Black Feminist Theory, Popular Culture/Race and Sexuality, Cultural Studies/Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives, and Contemporary Black Visual Art and Culture.
*Author was the winner of the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award and has received four Pushcart Prize nominations
*Author has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Kundiman, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Anderson Center for the Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program
*Author is currently a professor of Poetry, Fiction and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz
*Author hold’s Ph.D. in English from CUNY Graduate Center and M.A. in Poetry from New York University
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose (Counterpath Press, 2014), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018); and two forthcoming books Carmelina, Figures: An Artist’s Book (Wendy’s Subway, 2021), and a book of stories, Virgil Kills (Nightboat Books, 2022). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is, too, a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. The recipient of fellowships from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), and Yaddo, and is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies).
