Charles P. Brauer Faculty Fellow
About
"Mapmaker Scours a Border: Experiments in Afrodiasporic Translation"
Mapmaker Scours a Border: Experiments in Afrodiasporic Translation is an interdisciplinary poetry book project that queries inheritances of Americanness (in a hemispheric sense), blackness, and masculinity by introducing alternative modes of poetic cartography. Working across languages, geographies, and time periods, Mapmaker explores translational aftermaths of diasporic ways of being and knowing. I engage a range of literary forms to consider Afrodiasporic expressions of grief and grace in relation to the future, present, and past of black life in the Americas and around the world. Building beyond my translation of AfroCuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and my poetry collection, Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025), this genre-bending collection plots the contours of a radical cartographic praxis by interweaving my poetry, translation, visual art, and essayistic forms. How might a poetics of Afrodiasporic translation fathom the challenges of finding and co-creating black international community? As a poetic methodology, this multidisciplinary and translational research examines Afrodiasporic relationships across space-time, mapping creative connections between writers, artists, theorists, and Afrodescendant communities throughout the Americas.
Aaron Coleman is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
