Literary Landscapes: Keeonna Harris & Saretta Morgan (Phoenix)

Literary Landscapes: A public reading and conversation with Keeonna Harris & Saretta Morgan. Join us for the evening as both women share new work at the intersections of incarceration, intimacy and indigenous erasure in the borderlands. Conversation and audience Q&A to follow.

Literary Landscapes brings together emerging and renowned writers to share their work and interrogate how the landscapes and culturescapes of Arizona shape our emotional and interpersonal lives.

Keeonna Harris is a Black feminist, activist, mother, and doctoral candidate whose research focuses on gender, motherhood, and incarceration. Specifically, her research advocates for women and children who are collaterally harmed by mass incarceration. In addition to her academic work, Keeonna is committed to community organizing and self-determination efforts, working with others who have also been directly affected by mass incarceration to build a support and advocacy network for mothers and children who have incarcerated parents and partners. Currently, she is a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow working on Mainline Mama, a memoir of her experience as a Black mother co-parenting with an incarcerated father for almost twenty years, exposing the complexities of raising a family while living in the borderlands of the criminal justice system.

Saretta Morgan is the author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017) as well as a forthcoming full-length collection Plan Upon Arrival (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour, 2020). Her work uses text and objects to consider relationships between narrative and physical space, particularly as they relate to the histories and lived experience of Black quotidian resistance. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, among others. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona and teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.