This online program will be streamed live via Zoom. Registration closes one hour prior to the event start time.

“Briante’s living document sets the poet’s work of witness in the midst of our current entangled crises of borders, belonging, trauma, nationhood, empathy, and imagination.”—Claudia Rankine

Part documentary, part lyric essay, part primer, Defacing the Monument is an exploration of the many ways we might tell stories and a guidebook for anyone who believes in what documentary poetics, and all art, can and should do in this moment of crisis.

A former journalist, Susan Briante started taking graduate students to the US-Mexico border in 2016 to research and write about migration issues. What began as essays documenting the crisis turned into a reflection on documentary poetics: the act of witnessing and writing about the suffering of others. Defacing the Monument shows what happens to those who do not hold the “correct” documents and highlights how the archive bears the marks of power.

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