Please join us for the final event of the Fall 2017 Hallie Ford Literary Series, a reading by Tommy Pico. The reading will take place on Tuesday, November 14th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Hatfield Room (2nd floor of Hatfield Library) and is free and open to the public.
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), and Junk (forthcoming 2018 from Tin House Books). He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been profiled in Fusion, Nylon, and the New Yorker. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker at the Ace Hotel, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. @heyteebs
To give you a sense of his work, you’ll find a brief but descriptive review of Pico’s second collection, Nature Poem, from Publishers Weekly below:
“Pico (IRL) centers his second book-length poem on the trap of conforming to identity stereotypes as he ponders his reluctance to write about nature as a Native American. This is “fodder for the noble savage/ narrative,” he writes as ignorant people ask, “do I feel more connected to nature/ bc I’m NDN.” Other similarly problematic expectations are wryly discussed: “An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like// I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston/ I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry.” As an extension of this dilemma, Pico poses questions about what is natural human behavior: Is it natural for a football player to assault his girlfriend? Is colonialism natural? What about the feeling one gets while listening to Beyoncé’s “Mine”? Pico’s alter-ego “Teebs” remains in constant motion, leaping from the dentist’s office to drag queen karaoke night to the movie theater: “I’m an adult I only let myself have/ candy at the movies/ so I’ve been going to the movies A LOT.” In making the subliminal overt, Pico reclaims power by calling out microaggressions and drawing attention to himself in the face of oppression, “the way the only thing more obvious than your body/ is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.” (May)”
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-941040-63-8
If you have any questions about the event, please contact Danielle Deulen at dcdeulen@willamette.edu.