Two Poets: One A Former ANC Militant; the Other a Theorist of Afro-Pessimism

Frank B. Wilderson, III is an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. Dr. Wilderson spent five years in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress during the country’s transition from apartheid and was a member of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe. His books include Incognegro: a Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2015) and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Novelist Ishmael Reed called Incognegro “an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures [Black American and Black South African].” Wilderson's collection of poems, Sideways Between Stories, was published as a pamphlet by Commune Editions.

D.S. Marriott is originally from the UK, but now lives in Oakland, California. His poetry is often associated with the Cambridge school of poetry. And as a scholar, he has been a leading theorist of afro-pessimism. In addition to Duppies, just out in the US from Commune Editions, his recent books of poetry include Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018) joining his earlier critical works, On Black Men (Columbia University Press, 2000) and Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (Rutgers, 2007).