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Angel Nafis

@anaffy

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If you’re so smart, then why aren’t you kind?
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@sheer_awe stan account 🤙🏿

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Poets and artists Angel Nafis and Shira Erlichman usually don’t open up like this.

While the couple has been together for 14 years, they’ve “been on this marathon of deep privacy." But over the course of the past year — they got married last October — they’d been asking themselves, “What does it mean to share being homosexuals that did not have financial support to throw your own elopement in New York City as poets and writers?”

They planned the ceremony in two months as “two dykes with two dollars,” in Erlichman’s words. The theme, they joked, was “our lives, but fancy.”

At the link in bio, @anaffy and @sheer_awe give us a rare look into one of the most intimate moments of their lives.

Photographer: Naima Green by @anaffy

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a year ago

Celebrating 17 years living in this—the most soulful, perplexing, miracle dowsed city by WINNING A NYFA! 👅

land that grew me up. land that humbles me. land that makes me sweat, makes me cackle. land that made me sweeter. land where i fell in love. land where we eloped. land of my friends! my friends! freaks and poets and teachers and cooks. land of friends who move and return on a loop. land of intergenerational outdoor dance parties. land of lil arthouse movie theaters I give all my money to. land of a trillion bookstores. land of green parks to get lost in. home of the only beach where i’ll have my tits out. land where every neighborhood is its own ode. land of respect your neighbor or get tf out. break-your-heart-beautiful in any season. change your life in an afternoon and you weren’t even dressed for it. land of grand noise i expect but still can’t believe. always first place. never over. FOMOs antithesis cuz here whatever you’re doing is the best version of whatever you’re doing. land of women so fly you miss your stop staring. land of homosexuals!!! land of stylish and tolerable straight people! land of my father. land of black muslims. land of the Strothers and land of the Ganzies. land of my grandmother and baby uncle huddled up near the boardwalk. land i couldn’t leave even if i left. land of utter spontaneity and undisruptable rhythm. i owe it everything. and every day i give it everything i have.

17 years ago this summer my sister, my best friend and my gf drove me and all my stuff in a big blue minivan 12.5 hours from Ann Arbor to Harlem and so began one of the juciest love affairs of my life.

thank you @nyfacurrent 4 this cute support! it’s a dream to be recognized as an artist of nyc. (and a moment of silence for all national arts funding and how, no matter the number, it should always be more! more for the org and more fore the artist! we deserve so much actually. all these killers and rapacious demons in office and choking our planet to death and i should feel shy about a few extra zeros?? bitch please!!)

I love being a poet. I love being a writer. and omg i love living in new york!! 3 cheers for the life I made!!!

I LOVE YOU, NYC! 🔗❤️💋 by @anaffy

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2 months ago

Hooray and aw sookie-sookie now! Today a new poem of mine, up on Poem A Day 😇 Gratitude extends to sweet @samsax1 for loving, gay curation and making it all happen. Gratitude to the Hawthornden Foundation’s Casa Ecco Residency for the incomparable space to write this poem. That whole month I felt so cool and brave by those mountains and that big ass lake.

And thank you always and evermore to my best pal, thee queen, my beloved guy Giovanna, for whom this poem was written. Gio has co-piloted some of my favorite, most luscious days and has pressed her soul to my soul during the very wretched ones. I know I’m uniquely blessed to be cared for and so close to somebody who cherishes the world as much as I do—both of us, savoring the contours as grief mists this way and that. Time continues to mystify, and we miss our people long crossed over. But we are here—their absences taking the world and sharpening it and us. taken in Stone Fruit by @anaffy

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4 months ago

In this six-week, online workshop with Angel Nafis (@anaffy) we’ll study the work and world-making praxis of Black women writers and artists through their varied and multitudinous methods of portraiture, elegy, lyric-memoir, manifesto, tall tales and more. Swipe through to learn more & visit the link in our bio or bit.ly/bkpworkshops to register! by @anaffy

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4 months ago

🍒Visiting Artist: Angel Nafis🍒

We are THRILLED to welcome back one our our ISLiens’ favorite poets to learn from: Angel Nafis (she/her)! @anaffy 🍓🍓 PLUS! A special offer to add a 1-1 with Angel to your ISL package! (Spots are limited)

🍊 Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (2012).

🍊 Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, BLACK FUTURES, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere.

🍊 Angel is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.

🍊 She is the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she is The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo.

🍊 She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College

➡️➡️ Deadline to apply for our July session is JUNE 22nd!

🔗 Link in Bio to sign up, and/or to nominate a Surreal Scholar by @anaffy

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4 months ago

It is forbidden to love where we are not loved. taken in Material by @anaffy

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5 months ago

She was an itty bitty ting. She was so passionate. So earnest. More innocent than she could fathom! She was a piece of work, with a smart ass mouth & stayed biting a feeding hand. Damn she was smart. Much smarter than she accepted. Damn she was sweet. So much love she gave! Amazing considering how scared she was! Excited & excitable. Down to clown at the cost of kind of a lot. Power clashing clothes she made. Mikes hard lemonade. Puffing from a hollowed out apple. Incubus in the headphones. Always with a book of poems a journal & those fucking cocked hats!!!! Late. Insecure. Egoic. Rash. Radiant. No long term plans except for poems. Damn she was so young to be so devoted! Damn she was vulnerable. Thank God she found her people. Thank God she found her Jeff! Who, for the last 20 years, has insisted (with words & with actions) at every turn that she could be or do anything, that love & safety & art & freedom were her destiny & her right.

Jeff! Thank you for letting me be a kid. For honoring the inherent power dynamic. For respecting my mind, my autonomy. For the elegance with which our friendship has evolved now that I am the age you were when we met. Thank you for the purest most consequential mentorship of my life. Your consistency, your loving candor, your in the nick of time grace, all the books you gave me that I’m never giving back. When people meet you they don’t know who they meeting! They learn quick though. I treasure you & owe my life to the conspiracies that led you to Ann Arbor.

In 20 days (!!!) with our whole extended family in tow, we will gather together at Pioneer High School’s huge auditorium to celebrate his retirement after 32 years (!!!!!!!) of public school teaching. It will, no hyperbole, be the biggest flyest poetry show the state has ever seen, & a return to the roots of the blooms that to this day crop up all over the country thanks to Jeff.

EVERYBODY PULL UP! ITS TIME TO CELEBRATE! A reading, a reunion like none other. Like, worth traveling to even if you are not currently residing in Michigan. Tickets 🎟️ are wild affordable especially in proportion to the offering! QR code on flyer! Link in bio! Cop yours expeditiously 🥳 taken in Ann Arbor, Michigan by @anaffy

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5 months ago

I am kvelling and plotzing and so excited to share that ONE month from today (7-9pm on 5/22) Ann Arbor will be blessed with an epic show “Poems for the People!” featuring all-star, award winning authors Patricia Smith, Sarah Kay, Ross Gay, Shira Erlichman & Hanif Abdurraqib + an incredible crew of Volume alumni and current youth poets! I am so honored to co-host this event with Jeff and Angel Nafis.

This show is in celebration of Jeff Kass’ last year as a public school teacher after 32 years. If you know me, then I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Jeff and how he changed the trajectory of my life when I met him at 14 years old. I was a shy, insecure sophomore trying to blend into the background at our massive public school when I took his creative writing class and started going to his poetry workshops at the old Neutral Zone.

Through his mentorship and deep belief in me, I found my voice, I found myself- I became confident in my identity, my beliefs and my purpose. Jeff took other youth poets and I across the country to festivals and slams where we got to connect with poets from all over the world and sit at the feet of our poetry elders like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sekou Sundiata, Saul Williams, Sharon Olds and Rita Dove. He packed huge theaters and brought poets like Patricia Smith, Ross Gay, Patrick Rosal and Reggie Gibson to grace Ann Arbor’s stages. He built a program inspired by the wisdom of leaders like June Jordan (whose Poetry for the People program inspired the name of our show).

I came home from my first BNV in the Bay Area at age 16 and told my parents that when I grew up I wanted to move to the Bay and be a poetry teacher like Jeff. He didn’t just teach me how to write, he taught me how to teach- how to hold brave space. Witnessing him and other teaching artists build a national youth spoken word movement gave me the blueprint to do just that- after college I moved to the Bay and co-founded RAW Talent, then returned home 10 years later to take over the NZ Literary Arts program from him and co-founded Staying Power. Through these 3 decades of poetry life I have experienced such deep healing, inspiration and community. Continued in comments below💜 by @anaffy

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6 months ago

GREENLIGHT POETRY SALON NEXT WEEK! Wednesday 22nd Doors and wine 🍷 @ 7 poems promptly @ 730. Gunna be a doooooozy! Come early to get a seat. ANDRÉS CERPA! RACHEL CAMACHO! SARAH KAY! & LEIGH LUCAS! I’ll be hosting and radiating foolishness. Been looking forward to this glory-scheme for months slash maybe my whole life. Love all these legends real bad.

Been whispering and then sighing and then screaming FINALLY to myself all week. Finally finallllly FINALLY. The city has thawed and like clockwork The Tenderness is peeking through. Most sublime vibes all year round happen in New York City springtime. Joyously and rapturously I gobble up every and any iota of serotonin. Actually, we were not created to ONLY bear witness to horror! Come one come all! Blossoms new to the branch! Calves reintroduced to the air after a seemingly endless hibernation! Lovers swaying in matching denim! Bouquet of red roses like a baby in your arms! Eduardo Corral’s ‘Slow Lightening’ on a slow ass uptown 1 train! Impossibly loud, orange 18 year old tabby! Shira! Shira! Shira! Tulips leaning over the sink! Long stems sold out the truck back on a Saturday and I consider being late to cop! Poems Poems Poems! The ingredients are ingredients-ing. I am unembarrassed in my savoring. taken in Greenlight Bookstore by @anaffy

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6 months ago

Much has been said (by you, dear!) about my part in all this. The hours and the joyful encouragement. The gratitude is felt and accepted and still for me it feels like the flowers thanking the nose. Aside from the obviousness of your power, being a witness to your mind is unhyperbolically the honor of my life, and so really I am thanking you. Thank you for this ride, for how your discipline has rewired my brain. Thank you for the example of your grace through every draft, every submission. Thank you for this life and for making our dreams come true. Long ago, before we got married, before anything really, we decided, first tacitly then explicitly, to dedicate our lives to the work, our art, our own and each others, and its never once felt wrong or a precarious gamble. NOW, LOOK! Just like Dul said! You stayed on your path and the path is an orchard. The most euphoric, pleasurable bordering on erotic I Told You So of my life.

Tangerapple and IS are miraculous. Actually. Miracles. Through this novel and this poetry collection you have built a sanctuary for me and for us. I mean us like me and you but also the wider us, earthlings. With what you have imagined, I actually think you have deepened the collective contours of empathy. IS is so thoroughly compassionate it prompted a spiritual evolution component for me to even be able to approach editing. Tangerapple is Incandescent, just entirely unignorable. I read someone brilliant call the depths of marriage a ‘scalding intimacy’ and it’s that. Tangerapple lets us feel and confront that hot touch of union that breaks even time and mortality. From Tangerapple I feel more curious about death and from IS I feel more dedicated to living well. The worlds you have channeled, have reflected are strange-gorgeous, decadent-vital. Like eating a sumptuous feast from another planet with utensils from an ancestral home. Homecoming and voyage both. I could go on forever and you know I will. Shira! You are the artist of my life. You are one of one, a freak forreal-forreal. The other girlies and AI could simply never ever ever.

Do you get it yet?? It’s Shira’s world. We’re just ecstatically undulating in it. taken in Blissful by @anaffy

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7 months ago

Scenes from a potent 37 💃🏿🎈 taken in Bismillah by @anaffy

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10 months ago

I turned 37 yesterday and I’m both 37 years old and 37 years loved. I’ll talk about myself (a worthy and poppin topic tbh!) later. What I reeeeally wanna do is say thank god for my mom who made me and gave me so much in our brief overlap above the soil; who filled me with her intentions, her hopes, her creativity her dreaming. Who showed me an unrepayable, highest act of love, by choosing the possibility of me when it would have been safer, maybe saner to choose herself, her own life—my first ever birthday gift. The best one really, though it cuts! Fearless woman of sorts. My mom, seamstress, designer, enchanter, sweetpea Southside Chicago gurl. Who owned a dress shop and a candy shop and was an introvert not to be fucked with! Who went to art school and was serious about pressing her pants and loved the faggolas down. Who drew turtles in her notebook and won a trip to Italy to study. Who, if she really liked it, would say “Fantastic-o!” Who I am officially older than. She died 36 years ago at 36 and I’ve been feeling a lot of ways about that in the weeks leading up but today I just feel astonished, ecstatic, so grateful to be alive. Laughing and tearing up at the mystery of it! She’s in the writers room and I feel the pressure of her pen in this 37th episode. Badia, I’m grown! Fatastic-o!

Just lots and lots of protection and joy today and really the last 3 or so birthdays. And that’s because of Shira. The sacredness of our life together has activated my connection to everything else important and worth my time. Her impeccable, innovative, listening ass love, her righteous surprises, and the depth to which she knows me and the lengths she’ll go to for the lucky few people who she lets close to her. So thank you to her and the miracle of her company. I think marriage can be a thing where the love blurs the holidays into each other—her birthday has started to feel like mine too and my birthday often feels like our anniversary and our anniversary feels like New Year’s Day. And then also I think love does a thing where regular days take on an easy but holy symbolism. Our crib, a mosque. Happy birthday and regular day and every day to you and yours. taken in Badia by @anaffy

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10 months ago