Research Groups: Institutes, Labs and Centers

Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis

The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis (CBP) is an experimental multidisciplinary research and arts co-working hub, archival nexus, and creative studio foregrounding the importance of black study and diasporic technologies.

Ours is a space where we (transnational cultural workers, educators, researchers, activists, and system-impacted community members) think collaboratively and respond creatively in loving concern for the genre-defying performance of Black life and other inventions.

We privilege the multiplicity of traditions inaugurated by black poiēsis and we make (ourselves) monuments to its aesthetic possibility as at least one thing that we might cultivate with precision and care. 

We embrace our roles as makers and maintainers on the path to enact change, to transform our studies, and to relish liberatory practices and ideas about where we’ve been as we (re)imagine where and who we might want to be, together.

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Affiliated faculty members

SA Smythe portrait. Photo by Elliott Tilliczek

SA Smythe

Associate Professor

Recent News

Sankofa Currents journal cover

Hot off the press

A new issue of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis’s journal, Sankofa Currents, has been published. Read the journal

Professor SA Smythe receives multiple arts awards

Faculty of Information Assistant Professor SA Smythe, who is also a poet and transdisciplinary artist, has recently been recognized with two important awards for artists.   Earlier this month, it was announced Smythe, who teaches Black Studies and the Archive, has received a much coveted fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), […]