Tisa Bryant – Residual

Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program Assistant Professor Tisa Bryant will read from her new hybrid memoir, Residual. Publisher Nightboat Books gives this synopsis for Residual: “In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Tisa Bryant’s Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother’s everyday life, asking what becomes an archive—a bookshelf, a dresser, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories as well as archives of renowned Black women who died prematurely—including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler—Bryant’s hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, and failure in the wake of loss.” Residual is praised by Lara Mimosa Montes as “A meditative, soulful, and deeply moving tribute,” while Aisha Sabatini Sloan says: “Tisa Bryant is, quite simply, an icon. Her work lives not on my bookshelf but on an altar of formative texts as cherished, to me, as Toomer, Rilke, and Carson. In Residual, she grieves her mother as though solving a mystery, creating a portal that is also a museum, an account of her own becoming, aliving, breathing stage set. The pages are haunted by authors and artists across space and time, a presence that is not, as she writes, “an academic affair,” but a kind of lighting, longing, and music that enlivens the walls and corners of Bryant’s interior world.” Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Suné Woods and Cauleen Smith, and is forthcoming in the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers, and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays, most recently at ALOUD’s “School of Prince” event at the Los Angeles Public Library, and at “Speak Nearby,” a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination, Clockshop’s year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.