LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry

Photo: Jose Ivey.

A writer, vocalist, and sound artist, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (2013), a collection of poems, songs, and myths and is the cofounder and coeditor of Coon Bidness and SO4. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Rattapallax, Nocturnes, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, jubilat, Everything But the Burden, ART21 Magazine, Palabra, Ploughshares, Mandorla, P.M.S., Everything But the Burden, and Fence. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has produced literary/musical events for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, the David Rubenstein Atrium, and El Museo del Barrio. A native of Harlem, Diggs is the recipient of numerous awards, from organizations such as the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Laundromat Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, and Creative Capital.

Citation

LaTasha Nevada Diggs is the erudite daredevil poet, provoking the body to move as she moves the mind, allowing us, through her soundscapes and hybrid canvases, the privilege of hearing the solar system spin. In her exuberant and expansive collection TwERK, we are never far from the lustrous melting point of language. She shifts between English and any number of languages and vernaculars—Tagalog, Japanese, Cherokee, or Quechua—allowing a reader to consider the ways in which identity may be formed in a world still reckoning with legacies of colonialism and forced migration. In this heteroglot echo chamber a wide range of idioms—and their attendant forms of consciousness, of politics—collide and recombine. Humor, pathos, seduction, and violence are all in play.