(Not) Writing Access: Crip Mad Poetics

On April 26th from 6:00 - 7:30 pm ET, Rob Colgate and Andrew McEwan will join Max Ferguson in conversation about their disability and mad poetic practice. Rob and Andrew will share some of their poetry and, with Max, discuss how their crip (and) mad poetics can be made from disabled and mad states of being and be led by access aesthetics that changes the ways we engage with poetry. They will also discuss how disability, madness, and medicalization can lead to not writing and returning to writing.

EVENT INFORMATION

ACCESS: We will have ASL-English interpretation and live captioning at this event. Please contact Eliza Chandler (eliza.chandler@torontomuca) for access inquiries. 

LOCATION: Please join us in person in the Dean’s Conference Room, room 697 (and then follow the signs and the greeters), 99 Gerrard St. E. Toronto ON

Nearest accessible subway stop: Dundas Nearest accessible streetcar stops: Dundas / Church and Carlton / Church

K95 masks will be required and provided for all in-person attendees

ZOOM REGISTER:  To register for the event and receive the Zoom link please visit: https://torontomu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8oZychHLR_S8ed_j0sfG3A (external link) 

This event is supported by the School of Disability Studies AND Faculty of Community Services at TMU.

PRESENTERS:

Rob Colgate (he/she/they) is a Filipino-American poet from Evanston, IL. He holds a degree in psychology from Yale University and an MFA in poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. A Pushcart nominee, his work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square Review, Muzzle, and Adroit, among others; in 2022, he won the Andrew Julius Gutow Poetry Prize. He serves as assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Journal and as poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability. Currently, he is a Fulbright scholar in poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Disability Studies. 

Andrew McEwan (they/theirs) is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming from Talonbooks in 2024). They have also published numerous literary chapbooks including the recently-published Recoveringly. They work as an educator and researcher in Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Disability Studies, where they write on literary and cultural representations of madness and disability from a position of lived experience.

Max Ferguson (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and scholar. Currently, he is completing his PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at York University. His research focuses on anti-colonial approaches to transness and disability, medicalization, madness, neoliberalism, and necropolitics. A practicing artist since 1996, Max (Sarah) received their BFA from the University of Regina in 2001. He graduated with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2017. His artistic explorations involve atypical and trans-queer sexualities, activism, the body, surrealism, anti-colonial approaches to artmaking, and psychoanalysis.  Max works with a variety of media, readymades, paintstick, graphite, and digital collage. His practice blends high and low art approaches, art and academic theory, pop culture, and other influences. Currently, his work revolves around hybridized notions of photography, sculpture, installation and performance, and involves psychoanalysis, the body, activism, queer/trans theory, madness and neurodivergent ways of being. He is also a published poet and writer, holds a degree in journalism, and has worked as a political, legal, military, and arts writer and reporter.