The primary concern of cultural journalism is with the arts and creative work, and with the individuals, institutions and policies that make or enable that work or, alternatively, that disrupt those potentialities. Cultural journalism has the capacity to shake up the divisive mindsets that are endemic in our class-structured and still-colonized world, to work against gender-entrenched socio-political paradigms, through re-articulation of the notions of freedom of expression and artistic expression. As a trans-genre artist notable for her engagement with issues of social justice as well as the beauty of written language, Alexei Perry Cox will introduce some of the questions inherent in cultural journalism in a creatively engaged method. In this workshop, we will i) look at art works published by Beirut-based Samandal Comics; ii) discuss a New Yorker article that provides an overview of the imprisonment and court case that ensued for the artists of the comics; and iii) take part in a writing activity that takes up and reinvents this legacy in one’s own journalistic or editorial endeavours.
Alexei Perry Cox is a poet, scholar, and critic published internationally. Her writing has recently appeared, in various iterations, in Arc Poetry Magazine, Moko Magazine, The Puritan, Fiddlehead, carte-blanche, CV2, Makhzin / مخزن, Matrix, Cosmonauts Avenue, Rusted Radishes, Journal Safar (جورنال سفر) The Beijinger, Lemonhound and The Georgia Review. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection Under Her (Insomniac Press 2015) and two chapbooks, Finding Places to Make Places (Vallum 2019) and Re:Evolution (Gap Riot Press 2021). Her next collection, PLACE, is forthcoming with Noemi Press (2021).
Photo credit: Tony Elieh
My academic training is in English Literature and Creative Writing with a broad interdisciplinary focus on intersectionality and revolutionary thought – and, as a female of colour and Caribbean diaspora, I am dutiful in broadening these fields of study for all future students I encounter. My writing and teaching interests include diasporic theory, gender studies, colonized landscapes, as well as placemaking. I am, equally, an uncompromising cultural critic, an artist of language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience for our shared lands and spaces.
The specificity of the problems being investigated in all areas of my work is meant to share intercultural aims and concerns. My research interests generate works that oscillate by formal and discursive abilities to go back and forth between genres. I work with/in pluricultural and pluridisciplinary expressions and I am focused on dialoging between varying cultures. I work, collaboratively with many artists and talents, mixing styles and concerns that ultimately lead to the creation of experimental, hybrid, and original art forms.
My research interests are as unwieldy as my life has been: I am a published writer and scholar. I am a recording artist with years of touring experience and critically acclaimed albums. I am an accomplished poet, activist, screenwriter, a researcher, a mother, and essayist. But, above and across all, I am foremost a teacher and learner.
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