Upon careful review, the Editorial Board of the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series recommends The Three Sapphic Movements by Vi Khi Nao for publication through Black Lawrence Press.
About the Author
Photo credit: Scott Indermaur
Vi Khi Nao is a multidisciplinary writer working across poetry, fiction, theater, film, and collaborative art. She won the 2016 Nightboat Poetry Prize for The Old Philosopher and the 2017 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize for A Brief Alphabet of Torture. Her latest novel, The Italy Letters, was published by Melville House. A former Black Mountain Institute and the current 2024-2025 Iowa Artist fellow, she was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.
Artist’s Statement
The Three Sapphic Movements synthesizes visual and textual art through three sapphic impulses. Its components operate like a musical composition, with poems and drawings rhythmically pulsating with queer emotional and carnal intensity. The work is philosophically rich and imaginative, using drawings as dialogic partners to the biologically-grounded “fruit dykes.” This conversation presents queer desires as an existential reality, portraying them as innate and natural facets of biological existence. The graphic portion functions as a synthesis, transforming sapphic desire, visual forms, and poetry into displaced artifacts of “graphic desolation.” Rendered homeless and exiled in space, these diasporic elements are framed within postmodern textual panels, placing them within a deconstructive discourse of desire.
Excerpt
