Tzimmes

by Tisa Bryant

"Bryant demonstrates how gap and absence can be faced forthrightly, seen for the seams in a material history they are. That there are forms of damage, resistance, complicity, behind those moments of aphasia left open here, and that they can't thus be idealized as the aesthetic shades one pulls to shield one's ideological theater of interiority"—Taylor Brady. Saddlestapled chapbook.

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Tisa Bryant’s work often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history, creating multi-layered texts that demand new forms.

Her first book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from Eurocentric film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. In her introduction to Bryant’s recent reading, Stacy Szymaszek, director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York, said, “Like the great Edouard Glissant, her work is at once novel, essay and poetry, these modulations emerging and transmuting in a practice Bryant's latest publication, a collaborative volume with author/filmmaker Chris Kraus for the Belladonna Elders Series, contains an excerpt from her next novel, [the curator], a rumination on cinema and a black woman's ways of seeing.

Bryant maintains an active engagement with visual arts and literary community as a founding editor/publisher of the cross-genre hardcover annual, The Encyclopedia Project, and as faculty in the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.