ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An award-winning interdisciplinary artist and writer, Ni’Ja Whitson (MFA, MFAW), has been referred to as “majestic” by The New York Times, and recognized by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. They have received honors across disciplines and collaborate with notables in experimental and conventional theatre, dance, visual art, and music, while engaging writing fellowships at notable institutions such as Camargo Foundation, Hedgebrook and Bogliasco Study Center. Their published works include national and local print, such as Contact Quarterly, Area Chicago, FNews Magazine, and they were a featured writer of the 2017 BAM Next Wave reading series.
ABOUT THE MANUSCRIPT
The Unarrival Experiments is a hybrid book that alters the perceived terrain of language, and Black and Trans embodiedness to their rightful places in the cosmos. It is an experimental foray into visual poetics that follows Willie, a gender-less and body-less voice who conjures the rage and sublime of a Hunted blackness across time, bodies, and geographies.
The work explores the notion of the “vaporous body” via relationships between astrophysics, Blackness, and premature death. It centralizes dark matter and dark energy – invisible cosmic forces with an unequivocal impact on the composition of the universe – as portals to interrogating spaces of the unknown. It asks, “How do you see something you can’t see?” “What if Blackness, if the Hunted refused to become and exists in the unarrival?”