Ronaldo Wilson

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Ronaldo Wilson is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, academic and author of six collections of hybrid and experimental works spanning poetry, fiction, mixed genre theory, performance, digital, sound, and visual art. He was born on March 12, 1970 in Millington, Tennessee. In addition to being Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, he holds an BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in poetry from New York University, and a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“Wilson’s prose poems are alternately tough and tender probes into the underbelly of their psyches. With audacity and wit reminiscent of the work of Hilton Als, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin, Wilson decodes sociopolitical narratives around race, sexuality, and class.
Identity, Wilson seems to say, is only a collection of stories—the ones told about us in battle with the ones we tell ourselves. What we have here is palpable consciousness: a stunning achievement.”

Wilson has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Dixon Place, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lousiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program.

Sources: Ronaldo Wilson, UCSC

Images: Left, still from Color Series, 2014; right, still from Lucy Loves Thaddeus