Abolition in Brazil: Poetry Reading with Luciany Aparecida

@ Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation with Luciany Aparecida and Denise Carrascosa. A part of Denise Carrascosa’s October residency with Visualizing Abolition, Aparecida will read from and discuss her poetry chapbooks Macala (2022) and Aziri (2026). The works are inspired by nineteenth-century photographs of Black women taken in Brazil, shaped by the historical contexts of slavery and scientific racism. The research explores how poetry and fiction can reinscribe these images beyond the colonial gaze that originally produced them. Once confined within systems of economic exploitation and the aesthetic contemplation of whiteness, these women are now reimagined through a poetic practice in which poetry and photography converge as a feminist and abolitionist mode of critically engaging the archive. Following the wake, the work seeks to transform documents of violence into new aesthetic forms of freedom. Luciany Aparecida is a writer who was born in Bahia, in the Jiquiriçá River Valley, in 1982. She is the author of *Mata Doce*, a novel that won the 2024 São Paulo Literature Award. The novel was also a finalist for the 2024 Jabuti Prize and a semifinalist for the 2024 Oceanos Prize. She is a psychoanalyst in training and holds a Ph.D. in Literature, with research focused on literature and culture. Her studies explore writing, theory, and criticism of contemporary literature at the intersection of history, memory, ancestry, the Afro-diaspora, immigration, and nationhood. She is the author of *Aziri* (2016) and *Macala* (2022), poetry collections inspired by dialogues with photographs of Black women from the 19th century; and *Joanna Mina* (2021), a play that resulted from the “Dramaturgias em Processos” call for submissions by the USP Theater. Under the pen name Ruth Ducaso, she has published *Florim* (2020) and *Contos ordinários de melancolia* (2017), both through the independent publishing imprint 13S. She is currently conducting postdoctoral research in Literary Theory at the School of Humanities at PUCRS. She is a researcher with the Black Ancestry Literature Group at PUCSP. Aparecida was a guest writer in Berlin at the Middle Ground 2025 Festival; in Mexico at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2025; in Colombia at the Bogotá International Book Fair in 2024; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the FLUP 2024 Literary Festival of the Peripheries and at the FLIP 2022 Paraty International Literary Festival. Denise Carrascosa is a writer, lawyer, and full professor of literature at the Federal University of Bahia, in Brasil. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory and Criticism of Literature and Culture (UFBA) and completed postdoctoral studies in the History of Slavery in Brasil (UFRB). In 2010, she launched the abolitionist project Indocile Bodies and Free Minds: an art-education program for literary writing at the Women’s Prison Complex in Bahia, where she established, together with sentenced women inmates, the Free Minds Library (2012), enabling Sisters inside to access sentence remission through reading. Carrascosa wrote Técnicas e Políticas de si nas margens: literatura e prisão no Brasil pós-Carandiru (Appris, 2015); and edited Firminas em Fuga (Ed. Ogum’s, 2023), a poetry anthology by incarcerated women. As a guest author at FLIP 2023, she launched the abolitionist play O Pacto de Bocapiu: a cumplicidade silenciosa do femiNegricídio de Estado nas prisões (Ed. Ogum’s, 2023). At the 2024 Bahia Book Biennial, she launched her book of literary criticism essays from the past two decades, Corpo de Vento: Exu da Teoria – Travessias Crítico-Performativas pelas Artes Negras (EDUFBA, 2024). In 2024, she received the Esperança Garcia Award for her work in combating violence against women and was a finalist for the 66th Jabuti Award in the Reading Promotion Category. In 2025, she launched Bocapiu: the Hush Pact—the silent complicity of the State’s Blackfeminicide in prisons (Ogum’s Toques Press), translated by Jess Oliveira and Bruna Barros, at New York University and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In collaboration with Beatriz Carrascosa França, she edited the anthology Se Anastácia Falasse (Ogum’s Toques Negros, 2025) – a collection of short stories, testimonies, and chronicles by incarcerated women in Brasil. Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live