Akilah Oliver is a poet, performance artist and teacher. Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory(Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999), recently nominated for the PEN American Center's Open Book Award. A founding member of the L.A. based feminist performance art collective, The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, Oliver teaches at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, High Risk 2, Bombay Gin.Oliver's writing investigates the interstices and connections between 'blackness', 'femaleness' and 'heterogeniety', in a dynamic and elegant performance of dialogues with history, identity and sexuality. If only all performance-based work had this kind of integrity and magic on the page!

January 14, 2000