LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

2016 Winner in
Poetry

A writer, vocalist, and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013); three chapbooks which include Ichi-Ban and Ni-Ban (MOH Press), Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladonna Press), and the album, Televisíon. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Rattapallax, Nocturnes, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Ploughshares, Mandorla, P.M.S., jubilat, Everything But the Burden, ART21 Magazine, Palabra, and Fence. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at MoMA, the Walker Art Center, Modern Museum of Fort Worth Texas, and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, LaTasha has produced literary/musical events for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, David Rubenstein Atrium, and El Museo del Barrio. LaTasha has received scholarships, residencies, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, Naropa Institute, Millay Colony, Caldera Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Grant for Women, the Jerome Foundation, The Laundromat Project Create Change Public Art Program, the National Endowment of the Arts, US Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, and more. She is also the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a Whiting Award in Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ C.D. Wright Award for Poetry. A native of Harlem, LaTasha is also the cofounder and coeditor of Coon Bidness and SO4.

Photo Credit:
Willy Somma
Reviews & Praise

“Diggs’s poems truly work the whole body of the poem, the whole body of sound, the whole body of history, the whole body of voice and ear, the whole body of language and the ability of the page to be its own sonic syntax; they articulate and rotate joints that seemed fixed; they are bawdy and triumphant and they more than work. They TwERK.” —Joyelle McSweeney, Montevidayo

“While TwERK evokes the work of poets who experiment with vernacular English (Douglas Kearney) and Spanglish (Edwin Torres), Diggs doesn’t just claim those languages that “belong” to her, that she has formally studied or is biographically enmeshed with (Spanish, Quechua, Cherokee); TwERK also lovingly and promiscuously appropriates Maori, Yoruba, Japanese, Urdu, Chamorro, Malay, Papiamentu and many others in a tangle of global souths . . . Diggs’s remixes gum up the vehicle, revealing its porosity and fragility in the era of GoogleTranslate, and they push against the public/private language binary at the heart of liberalism.” —Urayoán Noel, Lana Turner Journal

“This is not a drive by book where you think you are going to read it in one sitting. Oftentimes I found myself caught in another world, a world authored by a poet unafraid to mix languages for the sake of something new and indeterminate. This book is a giver, it keeps giving.” —Randall Horton, The Offending Adam [on TwERK]

Selected Works

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From the Selection Committee

LaTasha Nevada Diggs is the erudite daredevil poet, provoking the body to move as she moves the mind, allowing us, through her soundscapes and hybrid canvases, the privilege of hearing the solar system spin. In her exuberant and expansive collection TwERK, we are never far from the lustrous melting point of language. She shifts between English and any number of languages and vernaculars—Tagalog, Japanese, Cherokee, or Quechua—allowing a reader to consider the ways in which identity may be formed in a world still reckoning with legacies of colonialism and forced migration.  In this heteroglot echo chamber a wide range of idioms—and their attendant forms of consciousness, of politics—collide and recombine. Humor, pathos, seduction, and violence are all in play.

Outside Links
Video (Reading from TWERK)
World Poetry Day Special (Video)
Free Verse (Walked Art Center) (Video)
Interview (Walker Art Center)