A Litany For Survival: Life & Work of Audre Lorde, Browne, Holiday, Johnson

This screening will be followed by a Second Read panel (see below). An epic portrait of the eloquent, award-winning Black, lesbian, poet, mother, teacher, and activist, Audre Lorde, whose writings -- spanning five decades -- articulated some of the most important social and political visions of the century. From Lorde's childhood roots in NYC's Harlem to her battle with breast cancer, this moving film explores a life and a body of work that embodied the connections between the Civil Rights movement, the Women's movement, and the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. At the heart of this documentary is Lorde's own challenge to "envision what has not been and work with every fiber of who we are to make the reality and pursuit of that vision irresistible."

She gave voice to a political generation and became a role model not only for black women but for everyone who believes, as she did, that “liberation is not the private province of any one particular group.”  In 1992 Lorde lost her battle with breast cancer, but she leaves behind a rich and vital legacy. A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, a powerful profile of the African American poet, will show as part of the spring 2021 edition of LitFilm: A BPL Film Festival About Writers.

“Audre Lorde was a pioneer in making available her voice as a teacher, a survivor, an activist, and a crusader against bigotry,” says filmmaker Ada Gay Griffin, who made A Litany for Survival with co-director Michelle Parkerson. The two spent eight years collaborating with Lorde, weaving together a richly textured portrait of a gifted, strong-willed woman who embraced life’s moments and focused her energies to fight for civil justice, women’s equality, and lesbian rights. A Litany for Survival features interviews with many of Lorde’s fellow poets and activists, including Adrienne Rich, Sapphire, and Sonia Sanchez—all of whom pay tribute to Lorde’s impact as a mentor and inspirational force.

Followed by a Second Read discussion at 7:00pm with author Emily Bernard, poets Mahogany L. Browne, Harmony Holiday, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and scholar Gina Athena Ulysse.

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in TLS, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Harper’s, O the Oprah Magazine, the Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxford American, and Ploughshares. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the 2020 LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. She has received fellowships and grants from Yale University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and The MacDowell Colony. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she lives in South Burlington, Vermont with her husband John Gennari and their twin daughters. ​

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer & educator. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby & Black Girl Magic (Macmillan), Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books) & Dear Twitter (Penmanship Books). She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign) & as an Arts for Justice grantee is completing What Metal Makes, her first book of essays on mass incarceration, investigating its impact on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, and the author of 5 collections of poetry including the forthcoming Maafa (Spring 2021). She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at LA’s MOCA. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvad. She’s currently working on a film commissioned for LA’s 2020 biennial Made in LA, and a collection of essays and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet and writer from Piscataway, NJ. SLINGSHOT (Nightboat 2019) his debut collection of poems, won the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow with Poetry Foundation and the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Brooklyn Public Library. 

Gina Athena Ulysse is a Haitian-American feminist anthropologist-artist. An interdisciplinary methodologist, her research questions and art practice engage geopolitics, historical representations, and the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions to confront the visceral in the structural. She is the author of several books and articles, including Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (2015), published in English, Kreyòl, and French,  and Because When God is too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017)- a collection of photographs, poetry, and performance texts. It was long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and awarded the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award. Gina edited "Caribbean Rasanblaj," a double issue of e-misférica, NYU's Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics journal. Her creative and non-fiction writing have appeared in American Ethnologist, AnthroNow, Feminist Studies, Gastronomica, Journal of Haitian Studies, Liminalities, PoemMemoirStory, Meridians, Souls, Third Text, and Transition Magazine. In 2020, her performance installation, "An Equitable Human Assertion," was presented in the Biennale of Sydney in Australia. She is currently a full professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, California. ginaathenaulysse.com