Womxn of Naropa Reading

Featuring student, staff, faculty, and alumnx of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

This event initiated by alumna Lark Fox almost 20 years ago, was a way to celebrate the women who broke the cultural barrier on the male dominated, homo-social environment of the literary world. Women of Naropa has been many things “…being packed into the basement student lounge, belly dancers, pianists, death rituals, sound miracles (one year we almost had no sound system), bahnu writing one off love poems, BLH [Bobbie Louise Hawkins] scolding the reading style of young poets, a plastic shower curtain backdrop, homemade programs and broadsides in cafes, wait lists of readers, always Anne, always flowers, always crowds, always cookies, always ritual and always poems…”.

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We’ve now shifted from Women to Womxn in order to allow a broader spectrum of the embodiment of what it is to be female, feminine, femme, butch, dyke, all the way to the epicene body horizon. The feminine principle is inherent to the writing process as embryonic and nurturing language into being. This is the evolution of our sangha as cohort as lineage.

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Curious to know more Womxn of Naropa? visit this list of recordings from the Archive curated by Swanee Astrid in 2020 for Poetry Month!

https://www.naropa.edu/2020/04/17/womxn-of-naropa-celebrates-national-poetry-month/