Ronaldo V. Wilson

“Staring,” “The Oasis,” and “Virgil” are from the forthcoming The Conservation of Mass: Stories, a collection exploring a number of characters, loosely based on the speaker’s relationship with contemporary beings, tricks, “po-biz,” cars, places, objects.  Starring “Virgil” as the main avatar, the book presents a fictive and remembered landscape of dreams and quotidian adventures rendered in multiple modes—through racialized and sexualized desire, to thoughts on theory and performance, psychic loss and recovery.

Masks, Drag, Body, Persona, Location—animate my performances in improvised spoken poetry, sound, visual art, and film. “Lucy Live 1” and “Lucy Live 2” are two short videos from AVATAR|DIASPORA, an interdisciplinary media project that reflects these performances, capturing my thinking of the poem as mode, embedded and amplified in the body of a visual field—elastic, changing—morphing across fluid form and content.  

Lucy Live 1

Lucy Live 2

Ronaldo  V.  Wilson,  PhD,  is  the  author  of  NARRATIVE  OF  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  BROWN  BOY  AND  THE  WHITE  MAN  (University  of  Pittsburgh,  2008),  winner  of  the  2007  Cave  Canem  Prize;  POEMS  OF  THE  BLACK  OBJECT  (Futurepoem  Books,  2009),  winner  of  the  Thom  Gunn  Award  for  Gay  Poetry  and  the  Asian  American  Literary  Award  in  Poetry  in  2010.  His  latest  books  are  FARTHER  TRAVELER:  POETRY,  PROSE,  OTHER  (Counterpath  Press,  2015),  finalist  for  a  Thom  Gunn  Award  for  Gay  Poetry,  and  LUCY  72  (1913  Press,  2018).  Co-founder  of  the  Black  Took  Collective,  Wilson  is  also  a  mixed  media  artist,  dancer,  and  performer,  and  Associate  Professor  of  Creative  Writing  and  Literature  at  UC  Santa  Cruz,  where  he  serves  on  the  core  faculty  of  the  Creative  Critical  PhD  Program,  and  co-directs  the  Creative  Writing  Program.